Kindergarten teacher Maria Knee of Deerfield, NH, is this year’s winner of the Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for Excellence in Education, which honors an early education teacher. Check out Knee's collection of online teaching tools and community outreach. Then read what she says about fusing kindergarten and 21st-century skills. As Knee puts it, blogging is the "bulletin board of the 21st century."
People don't usually talk about kindergartners and "Web 2.0" in the same breath!
That's changing a lot. I see it as a natural fit because kindergarten has all of these wonderful emerging skills, and technology is the tool to bring these skills—literacy especially—into having a real purpose. Giving my children an opportunity to have a true audience through our classroom blog, especially, was something that was a fit for me—instead of having meaningless writing exercises and no one understanding whom they're writing for. read more...
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SLJ Goes to the Movies
Prince Caspian
It’s no big deal that The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian looks suspiciously like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series and its fight scenes smack of an Errol Flynn swashbuckler.
What’s odd about this second installment of C. S. Lewis’s popular series is that the British actor Ben Barnes, as Prince Caspian, “talka lika theez,” because he (along with the other Telmarines, the race that has conquered Narnia) is a descendent of pirates who apparently hail from the Mediterranean. read more...
There’s still hope for school librarians in Mesa, AZ. The district’s governing board—which has proposed eliminating all media specialists over the next three years—now says it’s open to other suggestions.
That’s great news to Ann Dutton Ewbank, a librarian at Arizona State University and the key organizer of the Fund Our Future Arizona movement to save the district’s media specialists. read more...
U.S. Representative Mark Kirk (R-IL), who last year tried to revive a bill to protect kids from online predators, is now setting his sights on a new target: Second Life.
Kirk says the 3D gaming site offers "no protections to keep kids from virtual 'rape rooms,' brothels, and drug stores. read more...
More evidence than ever before points to the positive effects of good dental health on the whole body. Kids need to acquire good tooth-care habits as early as possible, and the titles below will help drive home the importance of brushing, flossing, and diet. Supplement these with educational games and animations available online in Spanish and English from the American Dental Association.
BEELER, Selby. Throw Your Tooth on the Roof: Tooth Traditions from Around the World. illus. by G. Brian Karas. Houghton. 1998. Tr $16. ISBN 978-0-395-89108-7; pap. $6.95. ISBN 978-0-618-15238-4. K-Gr 3— This book is for every youngster who has ever gone to bed minus one tooth. read more...
May 25 is “National Missing Children’s Day.” This week, take some time to remind kids and teens how to stay safe online and when posting information about themselves on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. This great site was created by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and is chock-full of activities and games.
Click on the “Kids” section and check out the “Inbox Defenders” game, which shows how to ward off unwanted email messages, and the “Meet the WizzyWigs” activity, which teaches children about Spamozoids, Hotheads, and other creepy online lurkers. Be sure older kids and teens browse around “NSTeens,” full of online comic books and videos. Take a look at NetSmartz411 (in the “Parents” section), which is full of ideas and information that parents and educators can use to start talking to kids about staying safe on the Web. Finally, be sure to watch both the social networking and cyberbullying videos yourself to help you get up to speed on what’s happening with teens online today. — Gail Junion-Metz
Serve as the liaison to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Libraries Systems Department; provide consultation, reference, collection management, and instructional services; develop and teach credit/non-credit courses or workshops for the University community; participate in a variety of Library-wide initiatives, projects and teams; serve as IT troubleshooter for Science Library. read more...
To see all positions available through the SLJ Career Center, click here...
Kindergarten teacher Maria Knee of Deerfield, NH, is this year’s winner of the Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for Excellence in Education, which honors an early education teacher. Check out 
