Joseph's Birthday

Today is Joseph's birthday!

Happy birthday to him!

(Joseph sent this image in to be used for his birthday post.)  :-)

Newbery and Caldecott Winners Just Announced

The 2013 Newbery and Caldecott winners were announced this morning.

Newbery Medal Winner:

Flora & Ulysses
By Kate DiCamillo

Newbery Honor Books:

Doll Bones
By Holly Black

The Year of Billy Miller
By Kevin Henkes

One Came Home
By Amy Timberlake

Paperboy
By Vince Vawter

Caldecott Medal Winner:

Locomotive
Written and Illustrated by Brian Floca

Caldecott Honor Books:

Journey
Written and Illustrated by Aaron Becker

Flora and the Flamingo
Written and Illustrated Molly Idle

Mr. Wuffles
Written and Illustrated by David Wiesner

 

 

There are more than 1 million apps in the App Store and more than 60 billion apps have been downloaded.   What apps do you recommend?   What apps have you purchased that you enjoy? 

 

Great Blog Winners

We have new blog winners for the month of December.

Winner of a $50.00 iTunes educational app card is Jean B.!



Five smaller prizes will be arriving in district mail for:
Julie B.
Lori
Jill
Marilyn
Janice

Possible Caldecott?

Journey, a wordless picture book by Aaron Becker, is hitting library blogs as a possible 2014 Caldecott.

Have you seen it?  A lonely young girl uses a red crayon to draw herself into another world.  It kind of seems like maybe she should have made the acquaintance of Harold (and his purple crayon). :-)

Are there other new picture books that you think might be contenders?

Newbery Predictions

The Newbery award will be announced at the end of this month.  

Doll Bones by Holly Black (who wrote the Spiderwick Chronicles) is one of the books that bloggers have been talking about as a possible contender.  Has anyone read it yet?  

Are there any titles that you've come across this year that you think might be contenders for the award?

Checking Out eBooks

We are currently exploring the possibility of checking out our Follett ebooks.

If a classroom teacher checked out The Biggest Snowball of All, he/she would be the only person who could access this title for whatever loan period we set (and we are considering 2 or 3 days).  The teacher's checkout would "live in the cloud" which means that he/she could view the book from any computer with internet access.  OR the teacher could download the new Follett app which is called Enlight onto his/her mobile device.  At that point, the teacher could also have The Biggest Snowball of All on his/her ipad or smartphone.  At the end of the loan period, the ebook simply disappears.  The teacher would also have the option to return the ebook early.

How do you feel about this?  For example, if a bunch of 4th grade students at Bonneville checked out the rock and mineral ebooks because they were doing a project in their classroom -- and then 4th grade students at Rose Park were doing rock and mineral and fossil research in the library, those ebooks would not be available for any librarian for research purposes.

How do you think the classroom teachers in your school would feel about this?  We have a concern about some of the popular ebook titles.  For example, the Martin Luther King, Jr. ebooks (we have 4 of them) are very popular in January.  If we DON'T check out ebooks, those 4 ebooks could conceivably be used by dozens and dozens of teachers over the course of the month.  Since most teachers probably only use these ebooks for 20 minutes or so with their students, many many teachers could use these ebooks just in one day.  But if we turn on the checkout feature, then those 4 titles could be tied up, and many fewer teachers would be able to use them.

How do you think your students would respond to this?  We have recently purchased a small beginning collection of novels (such as Hunger Games) that could be checked out, and we also have a few free novels that are in the public domain (such as Wuthering Heights) that could be checked out.  Most of these ebooks are secondary titles.  Do you think students would be interested in using the Enlight app on their personal mobile devices and checking out Hunger Games or The Book Thief or The Maze Runner or The Raven Boys or Twilight?  We would probably make the loan period 2 weeks for these ebooks.  If we make ebooks checkout-able, the features in Shelf where students can take notes and highlight passages and save them would be functionable.  We would probably allow students to check out 2-3 ebooks at a time.  Students would continue to be able to check out their normal amounts of regular hard copy books as well.

The ebooks cannot check out from the external Shelf link listed on the district page.  Students and teachers would check out their ebooks from within your Destiny catalog.

We would love to get your input about checking out ebooks!

As a side note -- we haven't heard yet if UEN has decided to purchase the MyOn ebooks and make them  a permanent part of Pioneer Online Library.  But IF they do decide to do this, then those ebooks will also be checkout-able through UEN.

Rose's Birthday

Today is Rose's birthday.

Happy birthday to her!

Amy's Birthday

Today is Amy's birthday!

Happy birthday to her!