FBA for High School

Anderson, MT. Feed. City: Candlewick, 2004


Wow--what a great read for techies and non-techies everywhere! The world of the future is one where we all have a chip in our head that allows us to access and download information directly into our brains with a mere thought. The "feed" is constant and sponsored by the corporate world of advertising, so each person's feed is customized to their buying history. Head to the moon on a trip and be bombarded with advertising about what to do and where to stay when you get there. A female protagonist is the lone dissident of this Brave New World-like book that had me hooked from the beginning. Although the language is pretty strong, I feel it would be a great companion to Brave New World, We, The Handmaid's Tale or simply a great read on its own.

Citations Made Easy

An oldie but a goodie in the citation department. Gone seem to be the days of requiring students and adults to memorize MLA and APA format. Instead, you simply enter your information into the Citation Machine website or the Ottobib website and the computer does it for you. Voila--citations made easy.

The Flip Camera

Finally, an affordable video camera for schools! The Flip is compact, lightweight, runs on double AA batteries and downloads directly to your computer instead of using tapes or memory cards. For about 150 US dollars, you get 60 minutes of video capability. It's incredibly easy to use--just point and hit a button to record--and for this low price, librarians and tech teachers could order several for the price of one digital video camera. I bought one myself and while the quality is not the same as a digital video camera, it has VGA (640x480) resolution and is more than enough for what the majority of teachers and students would need and use.

Bulletin Board Idea

For a fun beginning of the year bulletin board display, I put a note in the teachers' boxes asking them to write down a book title that was a favorite for them when they were in elementary school. I then took pictures of them reading that book and put the pictures outside the library as a display. It was great fun finding out more about the teachers, especially in my first year in a school, but it also is so fun for students to see pictures of their teachers reading their favorite book. A big thanks to my husband and daughter for volunteering to be my blog picture for this post--he loved any and all Berenstain Bears books as a child, so I'm sure my daughter will hear many of those stories in the future.

FBA-Fabulous Book Alert!

The Adventure Begins: First Day at Detinu International School. Jen Munnerlyn

In my opinion, this is a perfect international student book! Any student new to the international scene, or moving to a new international school, can relate to the character's feelings of eating different foods, speaking different languages, and the myriad of differences in general when arriving in a new country. It's a great book to use in the first few days of school or as a springboard for discussion about what it means to be a TCK, or Third Culture Kid. A friend and fellow teacher wrote this book (one in a series of more to come) because she herself grew up a TCK and found that there are few resources out there that address this group of children.

ESPN and Math/Science

While watching ESPN the other day, a segment came on where a surfer girl was chatting with an interviewer about how the sport relates to math and science. Hmmm, interesting...all of a sudden what is already a cool sport in the eyes of students became a lesson on wave properties and the electromagnetic spectrum. It was engaging and had me hooked. The website is geared for teachers with lessons for middle to high school students. Videos and lesson plans are included on the site with everything from waterskiing to billiards.

Fun With Geography

I am a huge fan of anything dealing with geography, and I'm loving this National Geographic sponsored site called My Wonderful World that I found recommended on another blog. There is a world geography quiz each day that you can take as well as a game to locate the various countries, continents or states. Having the quiz on a computer makes it more interesting and a great test of geographic knowledge. In a laptop school, taking the geography quiz of the day would be an excellent warm-up, and I'm thinking of using the site with upper grades in the library as a reinforcement of the curriculum.