Turning the Pages at the British Library

Turning Pages into Classroom Gold: Ancient Texts Shine on the Web - In Turning the Pages, the British Library puts some of the world's oldest, most beautiful, and culturally significant books online. Read about it in an article by Douglas Cruickshank in the latest issue of Edutopia at: http://www.edutopia.org/british-library-ancient-texts-online

If you haven't seen this before, you are in for a treat. This looks like a great resource for finding access to magnificent texts and primary sources.

In the words of the author, "The past has a brilliant future."

My First Library

This is a picture of the Arcadia Public Library in the 1950s. It's the first library my parents took me to, and the first I remember. I'm sure I still have my first library card, one of those small cardboard ones, with the little metal insert with my number on it. I'm sharing this piece of my personal history with you because I retrieved this picture from Calisphere, that great resource for pictures and pieces of California history. I use the site with students and teachers here at the high school, and we have found some amazing primary sources. This is such a wonderful example of what is available to us now in this digital age.

Recently I heard that our public library had contributed a lot of digitized pictures to the collection, so today I just searched Arcadia on the site. The very first picture was this one of the public library from my childhood. Have you tried searching the name of your city on the site? If you haven't tried Calisphere, I highly recommend it. There is usually a Calisphere workshop and booth at the annual CSLA conference, so you can catch up with the latest info about it there too.

Picture link:
(http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt7v19r287/;jsessionid=cEEx63mk7j6z4YeZ?query=arcadia&brand=calisphere)

NBC News Launches Free Online Learning Community for Teenagers

From eSchool News this week:

Current Site of the Week ...

NBC News launches free online learning community for teenagers
Immerse, Connect, Understand, and Excel. Its learning platform uses a patented technology, based on research from the MIT Education Arcade, called the CueCard; it's a combination media player, flash card, note-taking tool, and trading card. This "flip-card" technology allows users to watch streaming videos from NBC News and then "flip" the CueCard over for additional information. | eSchool News">Full Story

A Great Teen Library Page

I was doing my usual weekend trolling and reading through my blog roll on Google Reader, catching up with some of you and Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson, when I saw a link to the YALSA blog and a post about Teen Second Life. That lead me to a link to this teen library page, Library Loft PLCMC, from the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, home to the original 23 Things tutorial, the basis for our own SLL2.0.

This page is amazing and I want my library page to be like this. Of course, public libraries get to have a presence on Teen Second Life and we can't even look at it at school, but here's hoping. What I think is so important about completing the 23 things in School Library Learning 2.0 is that we are learning what these tools are, how they can be used and discovering new and inspiring ways to use them. It's a whole new world to some of us, but it's a real, current world for all of us right now.