All posts by Angie

Check it Out:, School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Best Digital Apps 2021: Britannica LaunchPacks: Science!

AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:

  • Innovation/Creativity
  • Active Participation
  • Collaboration
  • User-Friendly
  • Encourages Exploration
  • Information/Reference

We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.

This week we’re exploring one of the Britannica LaunchPacks: Science! This resource covers a variety of scientific topics and includes assignments, annotation tools, videos, articles, and links all divided by grade level from K-12.

“Britannica LaunchPacks: Science leverages high-quality, diverse digital content sets to build science knowledge and understanding, enabling educators to make strong cross-curricular connections to help students engage in meaningful learning. It allows educators to build content sets (Packs) that cover each of the disciplinary core ideas outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards and provide a seamless experience for students to think critically.”

Educator John Dabell offers his review of the resource here.

Watch this three-minute video to get an idea about all the possibilities this resource has to offer:

Check it Out:, School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Best Digital Tools 2021: Pixton EDU

AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:

  • Innovation/Creativity
  • Active Participation
  • Collaboration
  • User-Friendly
  • Encourages Exploration
  • Information/Reference

We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.

This week we’re exploring the digital comic creation resource Pixton EDU! Pixton EDU “is a web-app that gives educators and students a unique way to create stories, demonstrate learning, and enhance writing assignments – in any subject – through digital comics.”

Grades: 3-12

Common Sense Education reviews Pixton EDU here. Ed Tech Impact gives more info about the app in this article which also includes reviews from teachers who have used the app in their classrooms. This article from The Learning Counsel gets into detail about the ways Pixton is useful for educators and includes user reviews as well. And this series from What Binder Education has instructions for using Pixton plus links to downloadable resources!

Watch this one minute video preview of the Pixton resource!

https://youtu.be/nu0-VkR9ra0
Check it Out:, School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Best Digital Tools 2021: Bites Media

AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:

  • Innovation/Creativity
  • Active Participation
  • Collaboration
  • User-Friendly
  • Encourages Exploration
  • Information/Reference

We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.

This week we’re exploring the resource Bites Media!
“Bites Media is a news and information platform for middle and high school students that connects current events to civic and social principles. Librarians often use the platform as a research supplement for students, as each article contains 10-12 primary sources in one place. “

Grades: Middle-High School

The founders of Bites Media believe: “news is an educational tool and it is our civic duty to be informed and engaged citizens.” Their website has evaluated this entire page of news sources based on several factors including published ethics, history of journalistic integrity, consistent commitment to the truth, and more.

This page has several strategies and stories that link to tons of examples of how to include teaching about current events into the classroom.

And Bites Media has partnered with ADL to provide this free curriculum for high school students with 80 lesson plans that . You can see the standards the curriculum fulfills and download the curriculum and support materials here!

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Coming Soon: Bonus Podcast Episodes of Reading With Libraries!

Last week we celebrated our 100th episode of of our library skills and training podcast, Linking Our Libraries (check it out here!)

And this week, we’re starting to drop some new bonus episodes of our book group and reader’s advisory podcast: Reading With Libraries!

We’re focusing on some of the pop culture happening around us, and suggesting related books! You can get a feel for these episodes by checking out the ones we released last winter: Bridgerton, Soul, The Mandalorian, and Nomadland.

Starting tomorrow, we’ll drop four NEW episodes in our Reading With Libraries feed (if you’re subscribed to the podcast, you’ll get them automatically!) Otherwise, you can always listen to them right from our website!

We had so much fun finding books to go along with some of the summer’s upcoming movies and other entertainment! We hope you enjoy these episodes and get inspired to recommend books to your library community!

Check it Out:, Guest Blogger

Brenda Przybilla Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Brenda Przybilla, Library Specialist at Mary of Lourdes School in Little Falls, MN. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.

Mary of Lourdes School would like to thank you for the grant money that we received to upgrade our library system.

We were able to purchase two new scanners that we use for checking out materials to students and teachers. This has made it possible for multiple people to scan the items and has helped us be more productive. It is also a valuable tool to use in scanning new materials into our on-line library system.

In many cases this eliminates the need to hand enter information such as title, author and subjects into our library system.

We were also able to purchase label protectors that are used routinely as we add materials to our library.

Once again thank you for your support of our library, it is greatly appreciated!