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"Poetry is an act of peace."

3/31/2020

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Here are 17 things I thought were worth sharing:

With thanks to Pablo Neruda for this blog post’s title, poetry is EXACTLY what we should be turning towards in these difficult times. Whether it’s National Poetry Month (which begins today!) or not, the Academy of American Poets wants to help you celebrate!
Ask your students to write a response to a poetry video, and they just might hear back from that poet!
As we all stay at home and do our part to slow the spread of COVID-19, check out the hashtag #shelterinpoems on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
Create some spine poetry from the books you have around you!
Sign up for a new daily poetry podcast (created by our current U.S. Poet Laureate) that might just make you feel better!
Even though most of us are not riding the subways now, check out the MTA’s ongoing “Poetry in Motion” campaign.
Think about what role poetry plays in your life…
Sign up here to get a poem in your inbox every day!
This year, Poem in Your Pocket Day is on April 30th, and even though we probably won’t be together at school on that day, plan to celebrate anyway! You can download some poems for the day here, put together by several national and international poetry organizations.
Here are 22 Ways to Teach and Learn about Poetry with The New York Times (updated for 2020).
Billy Collins is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and more than 15 years ago, he created and edited “Poetry 180”, a way for poetry to be shared to high school students for every day they were in the school building. Enjoy this resource at the Library of Congress!
Here are two interactive tools that allow anyone to create, print, and share “erasure” poems: democratic texts and erasures.
We can’t travel very far these days, but we can now easily get back to 1954 if we want to!
Even though it’s physically closed, NYPL is still actively celebrating their 125th birthday! Click here to see 125 books that they just LOVE!
Smithsonian Open Access is a brand-new way to access and re-use millions of images from the Smithsonian’s archives!
The New York Times’ Learning Network now has a YouTube channel! Subscribe today!

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Read to Remember & Read to Forget...

1/31/2020

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Here are 17 things I thought were worth sharing:

photo illustration by Joan Wong

On the eve of Black History Month, LeVar Burton and a few friends have created “This is My Story”, a series of 6 short videos in which Burton shares stories that speak about some of the racist experiences of most black people in the United States. Difficult to listen to but necessary to hear, Burton proves yet again how transformational stories can be…
Google’s Black History Month video has gone viral.
Medium has created “The Zora Cannon”, a list of what they believe are the greatest books ever written by African American women. They also compiled a list of “The Next Generation” of black women writers they think you should read right now. Subscribe to Medium for free via your Google account.
My grandparents were among the millions of African Americans who traveled north during the Great Migration. These photos were all taken over a three week period in 1941 on the South Side of Chicago, where and when my father grew up. An amazing visual record of an important time in our country’s history.
400 years after slavery came to our shores, one of our most decorated African American novelists, both for young people and adults, traveled to Ghana to see what echoes of the past she could hear there.
Now you can read some articles and newspapers that Frederick Douglass wrote and edited!
Move over, Turnitin! You have some competition!
Just a reminder that whether you have a BPL, NYPL, or QPL library card, they all give you access to CulturePass, which in turn gives you access to dozens of NYC cultural institution, all free of charge!
Although I am a die-hard Brooklynite, I love my NYPL library card! Sign up for their Book of the Day newsletter!
The Library of Congress is keeping up with the times, and just created The LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive which collects and preserves online content which documents LGBTQ+ history, scholarship, and culture in the United States and around the world.
Canva is an amazing design resource (I use it all the time!), and now they have created an Education Program so you can apply with your school email and credentials to get a free subscription to Canva Pro!
We are living through times fraught with political turmoil and divisiveness. Reading, by its very nature, puts you in the shoes of other people. Check out a story about a woman’s reading project: “In the year leading up to the 2020 election, I would read (at least) one book from each state, as well as from Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., prioritizing contemporary fiction and memoir, with the hope of exploring shared experiences, such as family, identity and a sense of home.”
Attention art teachers: Paris museums just put 100,000 images online for unrestricted public use!
Want some free (or cheaper) alternatives to Photoshop & Illustrator?
Creative Commons just released a Chrome extension so that you can find and download CC-licensed photos (and their attributions) with just a click!
A listing of FREE (and sometimes FREE) cultural institutions in NYC!
Kialo Edu is a custom version of Kialo, the world's largest argument mapping and debate site, specifically designed for classroom use. Kialo’s mission is to promote well-reasoned discussion online, and to that end, Kialo is free for educators to use...

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Time to Hibernate & Read!

12/6/2019

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Here are 11 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. It’s the best time of the year to buy books for yourselves (and maybe other people!) Here are some helpful end-of-year lists you can check out to help you make your decisions!
100 Notable Books (New York Times)
Best Books of the Year (So Far) (Amazon)
Best Books of 2019 (Goodreads)
Best Books 2019 (Publishers Weekly)
Best Books 2019 (School Library Journal)
Best Young Adult Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews)
Best Books of 2019 (New York Public Library)
CSMCL Best Books of 2019
NPR’s Book Concierge 2019
Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2019

2. Better World Books + the Internet Archive = Perfect Together!

3. Even in these trying global and local times, there are reasons to be cheerful...

4. Want to get ahead and add more tools to your mental toolkit? Take some of these classes/certifications!

5. Teaching climate change to your students? Subscribe to Acid News for free!

6. There are more and more great books for teens about depression and other mental health issues. Check out some of them here and here.

7. Did you know that Poets.org created poetry lesson plans for multiple subject areas?

8. Brooklyn Prospect now has access to Adam Matthew’s Race Relations in America database! Click here for more details!

9. Stay tuned for details on our new free online access to the Financial Times and their lesson plans for teachers!

10. The folks at Stanford are really helpful! Check out their new & free Civic Online Reasoning curriculum that you can use with your students to help them better evaluate the information they come across in their digital lives.

11. Teachers, check out FindNYCulture! It is a “a searchable directory of New York’s 4600+ museums, libraries, historical societies, science centers, parks, zoos, university art galleries, planetariums, and more.” Perfect for teachers and parents!

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Fall into a great book!

10/29/2019

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Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing...

Got six minutes? Use them to read!
If you haven’t signed up for the New York Times’ Learning Network, do that today! They have tons of useful features, like Lesson of the Day to enrich your curricula and enlarge your students’ worlds!
I am always proud of my profession, and even more so when I read stories like this and this and this.
More proof that Print is not dead!
For the IB teachers in our school, sign up for some free on-demand IB webinars from Ideas Roadshow, which has “created a wide range of ‘on-demand’ webinars for DP coordinators, DP librarians, TOK teachers/coordinators, EE coordinators, and DP subject teachers in Groups 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6”.
More IB love from Ideas Roadshow! Sign up for their Investigating Knowledge emails that will enrich your IB curricula!
Interested in the state of public education nationwide? The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University has made their findings interactive and to quote an architect of the project, Andrew Ho of Harvard, “If you imagine state tests are separate pieces of cloth, we have found a way to stitch them together in a patchwork quilt. The result is a national perspective on the geography of educational opportunity. It is an unprecedented view of how our kids are learning in public schools and districts.”
Google Books is 15 years old! Learn about the history, future, and redesign of something that I use every day and that adds immeasurably to our world of knowledge and research!
During my first semester of library school, I read several articles about prison librarians, people who are 'a religion within the religion’ of librarianship. It was so moving to read about the ardor they had for the role they were playing. If you are interested, here is the open-access online book from UNESCO called “Books Behind Bars”.
And stay tuned for information about our high school becoming part of PBS’ POV Community Network!

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Welcome Back!!

9/3/2019

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Here are 12 things I thought were worth sharing:

If it’s September, it’s time for the Brooklyn Book Festival! The Festival runs from September 16th-September 23rd, with the Children’s and YA day on Saturday, September 21st, and the flagship day on Sunday, September 22nd. Click on the link to see all of the both up-and-coming and world-famous authors that will be in attendance!
Diversity is much more than a buzzword. It is a powerful way many of us structure our schools, lives, and reading lists, and now it is a new book search engine!
In case you missed it when it originally aired last year, now you can stream PBS’s “The Great American Read”!
How about some free posters celebrating Women Role Models in Science, Technology, and Math? They are available in 7 languages other than English!
Need data sets to let your students loose on? Try SCB, UNSD, FiveThirtyEight, ProPublica, Socrata, BigQuery, Quandl, data.world, data.gov, World Bank, GapMinder, Knoema, OEC, index mundi, and Pew Research. Here are some tips and lessons to make your students more data literate!
The Fifty Greatest Coming-of-Age novels (according to Literary Hub)...
The 1619 Project from the New York Times came out this summer to much praise and acclaim, and some criticism. Here it is on PBS NewsHour, and here is the collection of poems the Times commissioned to accompany the project.
Summer is not the only time to dive into reading! Try these tips that might help you be a more active and committed reader all year long!
Need strategies to help you pronounce the names of your new students?
September is #LibraryCardSignUpMonth! Put your own oxygen masks on first and make sure your own cards (BPL & NYPL) are active, and then make sure your students have active library cards as well!
Every year the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) curates and put out a list of the Best Websites for Teaching & Learning. Here is the list for 2019!
If your students are in grades 9-12, please let them know about the National Poetry Month Poster Contest! The winning student will receive $500, a $500 gift certificate to Blick Art Materials, art supplies from Sakura Color Products of America, and signed copies of books by this year's judges, renowned graphic memoirist and comic book artist Alison Bechdel and former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. The student will also be featured in American Poets magazine. Submissions will be accepted online between September 1 and October 25th, 2019.

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Summer Reading is my jam!!

6/3/2019

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Here are 13 things I thought were worth sharing:

Illustration by Nishant Choksi

1. Some Summer Reading Lists for you!
UC Berkeley Summer Reading List
Book Your Summer (Barnes & Noble)
NYPL Summer Reading 2019/Teen Book Lists
Publishers Weekly Summer Reading 2019
The Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2019 (Southern Living)
The Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2019 (Parade Magazine)
The New York Times Books (interactive)
We are Kid Lit Collective

2. The kids should see this. No really, they should!

3. Creative Commons has upped their image game and now has over 300 million images, with advanced searching options coming soon!

4. Statewide Summer Reading Resources out of Albany!

5. Literature & Math teachers, Unite!

6. Here is a spiffy updated MLA formatting poster shared with us from a library in Beijing!

7. It’s time for the 10th Annual New York Times Summer Reading Contest!

8. Go see some great live music in Brooklyn this summer! And here is a longer listing for all five boroughs!

9. Request a Woman Scientist, right here.

10. The Best Advice You Ever Received (and are willing to pass on)

11. Last fall, Google launched a new search engine that is helping scientists find the data sets that they need.

12. Want to walk the runway representing the subject you teach? Check out these dresses!

13. Free computer science curriculum from Google? Yes, please!

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Happy 200th Birthday, Walt Whitman!

4/9/2019

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Here are 7 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. America’s Poet, Brooklyn’s Own Walt Whitman, will turn 200 on May 31st, 2019! There are a multitude of happenings celebrating a man who celebrated himself and the city and country he called home. Click here for the 8-page tabloid “America Celebrates Walt Whitman” that lists events in New York City, places all over the country, and beyond. Some events have already happened, and some stretch into the fall, so be sure to check the list soon!

2. There are two new interactive tools that allow anyone to create, print, and share “erasure” poems from both democratic texts or stories from the New York Times.

3. As Spring Fever grips us in its talons, procrastination can easily run amok. Here are two takes on procrastination (TED & NYTimes), which will help us understand it when it happens to us or to our students…

4. Have we forgotten how to read? How to pay attention to pages instead of screens? I have hope that we can balance what both bring to our lives. So does Michael Harris. Another call to action to put down our screens and take up life again…

5. Love Pharrell? Love STEAM? Then check out Pharrell’s new Netflix series called Brainchild!

6. SYNC returns on April 25th and runs through August 1st! Be sure to sign up so you can get 28 free audiobook downloads over 14 weeks and fall in love with the spoken word again…

7. Want to share videos with your students but don’t want the surprise of objectionable content popping up? Try boclips!

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Keeping it 100!

3/11/2019

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Here are 14 things I thought were worth sharing:

Ever wonder what the most circulated library books are worldwide? Check out the OCLC’s list of the 100 most-circulated books of all time and see if any of your guesses were correct!
Want to wield some power and help decide which One Book New Yorkers read next? Head to NYPL on April 23rd and hear from all five shortlisted authors and cast your ballot!
Netflix wants to help you teach world languages and it’s as easy as downloading a Chrome browser extension!
Brain Pickings has been around for 12 years, and if you haven’t already signed up for this smart, insightful, book-loving newsletter, do so today!
John Green recently introduced a 10-episode Crash Course called “Navigating Digital Information”, developed in partnership with MediaWise–a project of the Poynter Institute, funded by Google, with curriculum developed by the Stanford History Education Group who gave us several important research projects, including the well-known study, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Take the course yourself & urge your students to, as well!
The Center for Fiction has a brand-new home in Brooklyn! It features a library, a sun-filled bookshop/cafe, a state-of-the-art auditorium, classroom space, and a writer’s studio. Make plans today to visit this sanctuary!
Want to become a credentialed Media Literacy Educator? Take PBS’s free online course and add to your skillset, your resume, and your life!
It is almost time for the much-anticipated and much-talked-about 2020 Census, but before that becomes front and center for all of us, you should definitely check out what the Census folks put together so you can creatively work in Statistics into every subject you teach. Kind of like hiding vegetables in your pasta sauce!
We don’t subscribe to Project Muse, so it’s great news to hear that they now feature several Open-Access Journals and many many Open Access books! Take some time to look through their offerings and enjoy the windfall!
Last month, 113 cultural institutions from across the globe participated in the 2019 #ColorOurCollections campaign, in which they all shared free printable coloring pages culled from their acquisitions. Last year, 181 institutions participated, and you can access coloring pages from both years of this campaign!
Next month is National Poetry Month, so it’s time again to learn how poetry can make both your lives & your classrooms better! The American Academy of Poets (the folks who bring you National Poetry Month) have created a new project, dear poet project 2019, that is “a multimedia education project inviting young people in grades five through twelve to write letters in response to poems written and read by some of the award-winning poets who serve on the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors.” They also created a curriculum and classroom activities for you, so check it out! Here is their list of “30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month”!
One of the “gateway poets” who infected me with a love of poetry is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and this month he turns 100! Bookseller, visionary, and still writing! Read what this American treasure has to say on the eve of his milestone birthday!
The 92Y is a wonderful local venue in which to see authors, poets, and playwrights. I’ve seen many there over the years! Their “Poetry Center Online” is a great place where you can access recordings by Lucille Clifton and hundreds of other poets.
This seems like a perfect time to remind you to subscribe to JSTOR Daily if you don’t already. Their tagline is “where news meets its scholarly match”, and it does not disappoint!

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“Don’t bother me….I’m reading!”

1/3/2019

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Here are 11 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. Reading makes an enormous difference in the lives of millions of people. You should try to be one of those people! Watch a young man who vowed to read a book a week for a whole year talk about how this goal changed him. Here he is at 20 weeks in, and again at 6 months in.
2. The simple truth about reading 200 books a year (and how to make it a habit).
3. Books are good for your brain.
4. What does immersing yourself in a book do to your brain?
5. It is never too early to make summer plans and pad your resume in the process! Check out the PD offerings from these organizations and apply today!:
Ford’s Theatre
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
American Bar Association
National Gallery of Art
USS Midway Museum
Historic Hudson Valley
New-York Historical Society
National Constitution Center
The National WWII Museum
National Portrait Gallery
Columbia University Teachers College
Supreme Court Summer Institute for Teachers
Summer Teachers Institute at St. John’s College
Summer Poetry Teachers Institute
6. The Books, Songs, Films, and other works that just entered the Public Domain two days ago...
7. Barack Obama shares his favorite books, music and movies of 2018.
8. The National Film Board of Canada has just created an online database of indigenous cinema for your viewing pleasure. Any dissemination of indigenous culture, anywhere in the world, is cause for celebration.
9. The Brooklyn Museum will be hosting a big Frida Kahlo show next month. Get your tickets for it now and get prepared by immersing yourself in Google’s online Frida celebration!
10. Speaking of Google, check out their new documentary series, “Search On", featuring “stories of people around the world using Google technology to solve big problems, answer hard questions, and take action.”
11. Find out more about the African Diaspora right here in New York City by going on a Black Gotham Experience Walking Tour, created and run by artist/historian Kamau Ware.

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Go buy yourselves some great books for the holidays!

12/4/2018

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Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. December is the month of End of Year Best of the Best Book Lists! Here are the lists for:
Amazon's Top 20 Picks for the Best Books of the Year So Far
Chicago Tribune 10 Best Books of 2018
Goodreads Choice Awards 2018
Library Reads Favorite of Favorites 2018
NYPL Best Books for Teens
The New York Times (10 Best of the Year)
The New York Times (100 Notable Books of 2018)
The New Yorker's Best Books of 2018
NPR’s Book Concierge
Publishers Weekly Best Books 2018
School Library Journal Best Books 2018

2. Kate DiCamillo on the magic of reading aloud.

3. NewsGuard is a new organization that employs journalists to combat misinformation, 24 hours a day. Download it as a free Google Chrome extension and see the reliability ratings of the news resources you visit and use in real time!

4. Some of our lucky 9th and 10th graders got to attend the National Book Awards’ Teen Press Conference last month and got to see all five YA finalists read excerpts of their books! Here is the list of which titles won across all categories.

5. The Library of Congress just launched Crowd, where you can volunteer to transcribe Abraham Lincoln’s letters and letters home from Civil War soldiers.

6. NYC Digital Safety is “a new initiative to bring resources covering digital privacy and data security to the City’s frontline public library staff”. Check out their modules and consider sharing them with your students!

7. “TeachRock is a standards-aligned, arts integration curriculum that uses the history of popular music and culture to help teachers engage students.” Get it today, free of charge!

8. Google recently launched Grow with Google, a platform that provides free training, tools, and events to support teachers, students, job seekers, and entrepreneurs.

9. The Gray Lady and Google Images are getting hitched!

10. “NASA just made their entire media library publicly-accessible and copyright free!”

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"Poetry is an act of peace."

Read to Remember & Read to Forget...

Time to Hibernate & Read!

Fall into a great book!

Welcome Back!!

Summer Reading is my jam!!

Happy 200th Birthday, Walt Whitman!

Keeping it 100!

“Don’t bother me….I’m reading!”

Go buy yourselves some great books for the holidays!

Leslie Gallager

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