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Happy 200th Birthday, Walt Whitman!

4/9/2019

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!

Keeping it 100!

3/11/2019

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!

“Don’t bother me….I’m reading!”

1/3/2019

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.

Go buy yourselves some great books for the holidays!

12/4/2018

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!”

All politics is local. All reading is global.

10/31/2018

Here are 13 things I thought were worth sharing:

Curious about what is required reading in 28 countries around the world?
Publishers Weekly just announced their Best Books of 2018 within 13 categories! Great for readers and anyone who buys books as holiday presents!
Want your vote to help thousands of readers find their next book? Then vote in the opening round of the Goodreads Choice Awards 2018! The winners in 21 categories will be announced on December 4th!
There are additional options for you other than Google Scholar: try Microsoft Academic (now in Beta), Get the Research (also in Beta), or Semantic Scholar to round out your research.
The Saturday Evening Post now has a new website and has cover archives going back almost 200 years!
The Art Institute of Chicago has now made their digital archives public, with over 44,000 images and counting...
Teddy Roosevelt’s papers are now online and available to the public through the Library of Congress.
Find an excuse to use NYC Open Data with your students. Get some ideas for your “open data in action” projects by viewing this gallery!
Have any HS students interested in fashion who want to take their research further? Send them here.
Want access to a John Green-led reading community where you get exclusive content about the book and author for as little as $10 every six weeks? Then check out Life’s Library Book Club! All of your subscription cost will go directly to Partners in Health.
ELA teachers: do you want to spread the wealth as well as get the wealth? Then check out a new crowd-sourced program called Book Club Share that allows teachers and librarians to move around classroom sets of books to those who need them and those who want to share them!
How well can your students tell factual from opinion statements? How about you?
Want a new Google product that can help you hyper-identify items in photos? How about a shortcut to your Google Drive, even if you don’t have your Chrome browser up?

Read like your life depends on it. It does!

10/10/2018

Here are 17 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. The shortlists for the National Book Award were announced this morning! The awards will be given out live on November 14th, and some of our high school students will be attending a special reading featuring all five shortlisted Young People’s Literature authors the day before!
2. The Public Library of Science has been sharing full-text open access scientific and medical articles since 2001...
3. The First Days Project collects and shares stories of immigrants and refugees from when they first came to the United States. Consider adding your story if you moved here from another country!
4. The OED is turning 90, and we are the ones getting a present! We have been granted a full year of access to the Oxford English Dictionary, for free! Click here to get our login details.
5. You’ve heard of mail being delivered late, but not THIS late! “The Prize Papers” is a recently-discovered and publicized “archive of 160,000 undelivered personal letters from all over the world, seized from ships captured during Britain’s naval wars over three centuries, and are to be digitized in a project offering an intimate glimpse into people’s lives.” Read all about the project here. Talk about primary sources!
6. JSTOR helps you teach your students about the fine points of researching with their “Research Basics” curriculum.
7. Sign up today for the Academy of American Poets’ “Teach this Poem”, the winner of the 2018 Innovations in Reading Prize given by the National Book Foundation.
8. Please note I have updated the following pages on the Library website with more resources: Chemistry, Literature, and Watch, Listen & Learn!
9. Download free e-books and textbooks from Bookboon!
10. Just a few of the websites that the AASL chose as the best of the best this year: All Sides for Schools, Biointeractive, EarSketch, edWeb, The Global Goals, Loom (Chrome extension), NewseumEd, PencilCode, Science Friday, Stanford History Education Group, and Time.Graphics.
11. UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library has just created and shared their new digital archive: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement.
12. The European Planetary Science Congress has just released a catalog of over 2,200 planetary maps produced worldwide from between 1600 and 2018.
13. The Library of Congress has expanded its reach! They now house a collection called the National Screening Room that “showcases the riches of the Library’s vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to the viewers worldwide.”
14. Open Sources continue to be our new currency! Search for them here, via a new portal created by the SUNY Geneseo Library.
15. This has nothing to do with books, but has everything to do with what books are made of! Did you know that all of NYC’s trees are mapped, and that you can get all kinds of info about each one of those 678,619 trees?
16. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has created Open Bookshelf, “a digital library collection of popular books free to download, formatted for modern devices, and handpicked by a Curation Corps of librarians from across the US.”
17. Humanities & ELA teachers: Last month the Library of Congress launched DBQuest and Case Maker, two new web and mobile apps that join a suite of digital resources introduced back in 2016. These new interactive opportunities for middle and high school students will engage learners in interactive civics, asking them to weigh evidence and build arguments.

I forgot to mention...

9/10/2018

Here are 12 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. Want to take your students on a field trip? Then apply for a Target Field Trip Grant today! Each grant is worth up to $700, and the entry deadline is October 1st.
2. It's time for the Scholastic Writing Awards again! Begun in 1923, it is the nation's longest-running writing and artistic competition for young people. The competition opens on September 12th, so be sure to tell your students to enter. "Through the Scholastic Awards, teens in grades 7–12 from public, private, or home schools can apply in 29 categories of art and writing for their chance to earn scholarships and have their works exhibited and published."
3. Would you like to connect to a non-profit organization that sells surplus items to teachers for very low prices?
4. If you live or work in Brooklyn (now I know at least one of those things applies to you!), sign up today to get a free Brooklyn Public Library Teacher Card. You will become a “Super Patron”, and be able to borrow more items for longer periods than anyone else!
5. Get your $10 ticket and listen to the founder of Politifact and other fighters-for-facts as they discuss “Our Fake Reality: Journalism, Legitimacy, and Post-Fact America”on September 27th.
6. Use this repository of ads from all over the world as a springboard for lessons or researching.
7. Just in time for the November election, Teaching Tolerance and Rock the Vote have teamed up to create “Voting and Voices”, a collection of resources for you and your students about the history and process of voting.
8. Over the summer, Artstor made more than 1 million image, video, document and audio files from public institutions freely available to everyone!
9. A love letter to libraries and reading, brought to you by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell.
10. The New York Historical Society offers free and low-cost afterschool PDs for teachers, related to their ever-changing exhibitions. Some are happening really soon, so check out the list today!
11. Harry Potter has been in the USA for 20 years, and The New York Historical Society is celebrating this with their upcoming exhibition Harry Potter: A History of Magic, which opens on October 5th and runs through January 27th.
12. Free full-color reading propaganda posters for to download and print for your classrooms!

Buckle up, Buttercup!

8/31/2018

Here are 14 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. The Brooklyn Book Festival is a perfect way to begin the new school year and your personal reading year!
2. Things are getting real on The Great American Read! Tune in on September 11th for their first episode of the season, and set the rest of the series to tape. I printed out the librarian/educator’s guide, so stop by and take a look.
3. It is still technically summer, so here is Obama’s Summer Reading List if you missed it...
4. Did you know you could get free admission to dozens of NYC cultural institutions just by using your library card?
5. Would you like free hands-on PD opportunities focused on digital media?
6. Banned Books Week 2018 runs from September 23rd-29th. Resist censorship and dive into one of these books during that week and all year long.
7. The NYPL is posting classic stories on Instagram.
8. For the first time in 22 years, the American Academy of Poets is sponsoring a contest for high school students to create their National Poetry Month poster that gets sent out to over 100,000 schools, libraries, and bookstores. Spread the word to your students (entries due by 10/31) and find the details here.
9. Want to fill your bookshelves and make a difference at the same time? Head to Brooklyn Public Library’s Big Brooklyn Book Sale on October 20th at their Central Branch.
10. Don’t forget to use the New York Times’ Learning Network!
11. JSTOR has plenty of Open Content for both you and your students.
12. PBS Learning Media has a special database of free resources, specially curated for teachers in New York.
13. Enrich both your school and professional lives by attending free (sometimes!) cultural events in our City. Check out the fall rosters for the Museum of the City of New York, NYPL, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The New York Historical Society, and the 92Y!
14. As of three days ago, Flipgrid is now free for all educators!

How to read more...

6/1/2018

Here are 8 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. Bill Gates recommends these 5 books for your summer reading.

2. The Great American Read = between now and October 18th, help our country vote for its favorite book!

3. The Ninth Annual New York Times Summer Reading Contest begins on June 15th! Check here starting then and learn now you can be one of the teens from around the world that get published in the New York Times!

4. 30 Best Book Engines to Find Your Perfect Summer Read!

5. Check out the summer reading put together by the following publications & blogs:
16 Books to Read This Summer (Town & Country)
Summer Reading 2018 (Brooklyn Public Library)
The 20 Smart Books You’ll Want to Read at the Beach This Summer (Esquire)
The Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 (So Far) (Esquire)
The Ultimate YA Summer Reading List - 2018 Edition (Brightly)
The Best Books of 2018 (So Far) (Real Simple)
Summer Reads 2018 (Publishers Weekly)
What We’re Reading This Summer (The Atlantic)
The 39 Books We’re Talking About This Summer (The Washington Post)
The Best Summer Beach Reads of Summer 2018 (The Daily Beast)
The 100 Stories That Shaped the World (BBC)
10 Dark Thrillers to Read in the Sunshine (Publishers Weekly)

6. A free app to help teens, parents, librarians and library staff, educators, and anyone who loves YA literature access nearly 4,000 titles recognized YALSA's awards and lists on their smartphone? Yes, please!

7. As part of Summer Reading at New York Libraries, the State Education Department and myON are partnering to bring thousands of enhanced digital books to children from birth through 8th grade and their families all around the state! Click here for more information and login details!

8. Can’t get out of town this summer? The BBC has you covered!

Listen Up!

5/1/2018

Here are 9 things I thought were worth sharing:

Sync is a free summer audiobook program for teens 13+ that runs from April 26th-July 25th, and provides two free book downloads every week via the free Overdrive app. Get listening today!
Here’s a round-up of podcasts for anyone interested in YA literature: Teen Creeps, First Draft, 88 Cups of Tea, Text Messages (archive only), Put a Blurb on It, Cast of Wonders, and HEY YA.
Here are some not-to-be-missed podcasts about books that can help to get you primed for summer reading: The Book Review (NYTimes), So Many Damn Books, Lit Up, and Fiction Podcast (The New Yorker).
After having books “talk” to you via audiobooks, take an opportunity to talk back to them! Google recently launched “Talk to Books”, which allows browsers to use natural language searches and AI to allow books to “talk back” to your query with related passages.
The BBC Archive has been busy collecting over 16,000 sound effects for you to use in your teaching or in your life!
World Resources Institute and more than 30 partners just launched Resource Watch, a platform that provides trusted and timely data for a sustainable future. It leverages technology and near-real-time data to bring much-needed transparency on the state of the planet’s people, resources and commerce all in one place. Great resource for all science teachers and students!
“The Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.” Now it’s all online (March 1936-now) and accessible to everyone! Great for teachers or student researching US history!
Playing around with how you want your designs and presentations to look? Try wordmark.It and see what your words will look like in hundreds of different fonts!
Don’t forget that we subscribe to JStor!! They don’t forget the major role they play in providing resources for secondary and post-secondary students and teachers, and add publications to their database each month. Take a look at the publications they’ve added over the last 15 months (under “Recently added journal content”) and don’t forget to check JStor first when you need to research!