Can't help my-shelf

Credit: @ stefanoborghi.com Copyright: photo: www.stefanoborghi.com Making is an inquiry-driven social activity that allows students to develop the very same skills, dispositions, responsibilities, and strategies touted in the AASL's 21st Century Standards. It opens the library to students who want to acquire, use, and share information in ways other than book-discussion groups or research writing. Makers... apply digital and manual skills to solve problems and create items that address their needs. Makers are problem solvers, idea dreamers; they tinker, hack, and customize products and materials to better serve them. Makers live out lifelong learning. They see a problem, something that isn't working for them, and they research ways to solve the problem and experiment, pushing the limits until they are satisfied. (Canino-Fluit, 2014, para. 3)   Makerspaces (or innovation labs, creation stations, hackerspaces, STEM hubs, fab labs, etc.; a rose by any other name, after all....

makeameme.org Cyberbullying. What is there left to say? I've really spent some uncomfortable hours sitting with the topic this week, and rather than feeling better equipped to prevent or effectively address the issue, I feel disheartened about its indissoluble nature and seeming inevitability. THANKS, DR. GREEN! 😉   I appreciate the framing from this week's Faucher et al. piece of cyberbullying as repeated behaviors intended to cause harm and born out of a desire for or assertion of power. Is one mean text or mean-spirited social media post cyberbullying, maybe not, but it could be indicative of a deeper and budding pattern of abuse, and we have little hope of eradicating the weed if we do not first locate and pull it out by its root. Studying those roots can tell us how the organism of cyberbullying grows and thrives, so that we are better equipped to combat its spread. But wow, is that a daunting challenge. In terms of appeal and consequence, cyberbullying is like any other...

"Librarians and library workers who serve teens know that staying up on trends, including those related to social media and marketing, is just part of the job" (Wetta, 2016, p. 32).  There's a meme format with which you might be familiar: wanna feel old? This particular meme always begins the same way, but has launched countless create-your-own endings aimed at reminding their readers that something which may feel like a recent memory actually happened long ago ("long" being relative to each iteration of the meme, of course). I think it's safe to say that, in the unlikely event you do find yourself wanting to feel old, spending a few minutes with middle school students is just the ticket. Their interests, role models, fashions, inside jokes and cultural references are nearly all inspired by or integral to the online content they consume and the social media platforms they use. If you are already keeping up with the who, what, when, and wheres (can the 'w...