has entire picture books online! I’ve bought many picture books (based on reviews) that have turned out to be dogs. I always check Amazon to see if they have a “Search Inside” version - but often they don’t. This is even better - you can check out the entire book. The selection is pretty small now, but I hope they keep it up. A handy collection development tool, and it’s fun watching the pages turn.
Here in Vermont, we’re having a perfect storm of book awards. Voting for this year’s books and lists for next year are popping up all over.
The DCF committee is now offering online voting (yay Steve!) and their super new list is up too. (pdf) They’re going to get big props from my kids for including Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It probably won’t completely make up for the lack of Rick Riordan books, but it’s a start.
The 2008/09 Red Clover list is online.
Librarians need to send in the votes for both the DCF & Red Clover awards by Friday, April 11.
The Green Mountain Book Award tallies are due May 2nd, forms for reporting can be found one their site. The new list isn’t online yet, but was sent out to the listservs. Great books. (Sarah Vowell - wow!)
13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Black and White by Paul Volponi
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Bucking the Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch
It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Nick Vizzini
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado with Vince Rause
The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci
Hold the fort, here’s a very handy search engine.
Compfight is a super easy way to search Flickr for images. It’s got a very simple interface, it feeds you back loads of clickable thumbnails, allows you to limit to Creative Commons licensed material, and gives you the option of searching full-text or just tags.
With more opportunities to publish student research projects online, it seems to me we should really be pushing the use of CC-licensed images in student work. I’ll definitely be showing this to the students. (and Safe Search is the default. nice.)
This is the form I use with students for evaluating websites. After much tweaking and borrowing I find this works pretty well for most of my students as well as teachers I work with. I don’t share things like this often enough because I’m never satisfied, but I saw a request on a listserv for evaluation forms, so thought I’d post mine. Anyone should feel free to borrow/edit at will.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Here’s one wacky business decision
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. … As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.
With the shift, the Oakland-based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment and health.
I know many school librarians struggle to get students to try different search engines. But now that it sounds like Ask will be as cheesy as Yahoo! Kids, I think we need to focus energy on teaching more in-depth Google strategies, instead of trying to buck the trend.