It's Good to See You!

Here are 13 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. Welcome back to possibly the weirdest school year in recent history! All over the world, content creators have been retooling their offerings to make it easier for you and your students to learn and connect with each other. In advance of one of the most contentious presidential elections ever, it’s even more important than ever to consume and spread accurate information. Taking a free class from Checkology can help you do this.
2. One of my favorite things to do each September is to head to the Brooklyn Book Festival to buy books, meet authors, and steep myself in book culture. This year the festival will be online from September 28th-October 4th. Further uptown, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (a division of the NYPL) will be hosting their own online literary festival from September 21-26. I’ve already signed up for one of the events! Further afield, the National Book Festival (sponsored by the Library of Congress) will also be held online from September 25-27th. For the first time ever, part of the National Book Festival will be broadcast on PBS, so set your DVRs!
3. I have dusted off my list of Remote Learning Tools from this spring for you and your students, and will be adding new things on a regular basis (noted in yellow).
4. Our country is going through a much-needed racial reckoning, and our corner of Brooklyn is taking a deeper look at our collective educational history and is doing something about it. 
5. Even if you don’t subscribe to The New York Times (you really should!), their Learning Network is always free to both educators and students. Take some time to peruse their many tools and make them work for you and encourage your students to enter their student contests!
6. Our school has an educational subscription to the New York Times. Please let me know if the link doesn’t work!
7. Leave it to a school librarian to rally her librarian comrades to crowdsource a free interactive ebook full of tech tools that will help you do your job! 
8. Over the summer, I updated my Anti-Racism Reading List and will continue to add books to this list.
9. I just updated our Election 2020 page with new resources.
10. While Covid-19 has narrowed the options about where we can go in person, it has enlarged our virtual opportunities! Consider signing up for e-newsletters from local cultural organizations (like The Brooklyn Historical Society or Community Bookstore) so you can attend their many online offerings! 
11. We may not all be ELA teachers, but we are all readers! It’s always good to take a fresh look at what we teach and what we read, with an eye for tweaking and for making some switches. Penguin Random House gives us some suggestions!
12. Want to send your students on a field trip to better understand diseases like Covid-19? Here are 7 virtual museum exhibits that explore pandemics. 
13. Powered by Common Sense Media, Wide Open School makes it easier for you to provide engaging content to your students, wherever they are!