Gaming Alignment-AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner

Today I attended a presentation/demonstration of gaming and how it applies to K-12 education. I was given a two-page document of a gaming alignment for the 21st Century Learner Standards. The alignment was written by the member librarians of the School Library System of Genesee County BOCES and coordinated by Christopher Harris. We also had a chance to see games up close and personal. I finally got to see World of Warcraft and try out a Wii! I haven’t played tennis in years and it showed!

Kevin Henkes

I am in Madison, Wisconsin, for the AASL Region III Affiliate Meetings. I will be here through Sunday morning. Tonight a few of us met at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to hear author Kevin Henkes read from his new book Bird Lake Moon. This is Kevin’s 38th book and tonight was the official launch. Kevin read a lengthy excerpt from the book and it sounds like a poignant, beautiful story.

Heading for Wisconsin

I leave tomorrow morning for Madison, Wisconsin, and the AASL Region III Affiliate meeting. As the President of the Michigan Association for Media in Education (MAME) I will be attending with our Past President to discuss school library media center issues. I probably won’t have a chance to do much blogging in the next few days but I will try for next week. I return Sunday night and on Monday I will be training educators in Detroit on databases kids can use in elementary and middle school.

Search Sites

I attended the Super Searcher session by Mary Ellen Bates while attending the CIL conference. A few of the great sites she mentioned are the Google News Archive Search, DoubleTrust and Nationmaster. The Google News Archive Search is great when searching for timeline articles on a subject because it does actually search archives. Perhaps a good student site for research?  DoubleTrust is interesting because it compares Google and Yahoo results. Nationmaster is a good source for national statistics. Another good site for student research. You can choose from several topics and get graphical information as a result.

National Library Week

For the last several years the Oakland Schools Information Center staff has celebrated NLW with an ice cream social. We held the social today and had 74 employees participate. Besides the “make your own sundae” bar we gave away posters and totebags gathered from conferences. We also gave away some door prizes of totebags each containing a children’s book. It’s a fun way to get employees to the Information Center to remind them about our services and resources and just plain fun for networking.