In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration, and encourage discovery and curiosity.
The app Engaging Congress is a “fun, interactive game that uses primary source documents to explore the basic tenets of representative government and the challenges they face in contemporary society.”
Level: Middle and High School
Platform: Android and iPhone
Cost: FREE!
According to this article from the National Council for Social Studies, the goal of the app is to “inform students about the legislative process and to do so in a format that is consistent with how young people today receive information.”
This article from School Library Journal gives a more detailed explanation of the app and highlights the resources for educators available at the Engaging Congress site.
I’m a librarian! I like to have things labeled!! And when we are thinking about usability in libraries – always a key aspect of any library – making it very clear where all the different types of books can be found is a key to really implementing that usability!
I love to see unique features in libraries – and this stage area is just adorable! It is handy for hanging artwork on the side facing the rest of the library, and also has some steps and an area that could be used for performing or other fun stuff.
If you have been keeping up with our 
I love to see these shelves, sized just right for the patrons who will be using these materials! This school is preK through grade 5, so many of the patrons will not be very tall, and they will be interested in books that are fairly large. So these shelves are just right: a good height for easy browsing, and filled with books that are easy to flip through and lots of good cover art to admire! Thinking about the things your community members will need, and figuring out to best provide it to them, is the key to successful library services.
Another great example of this kind of usability is the labeling of the series books. As a very dedicated series reader myself, I always appreciate it when a library helps me out with finding the next book in the series. And in this library, these cute and handy book shelf tags are right there to help patrons find their next books!
Of course, in any school library students are not the only members of the community served by the library. Here you can see the packets of books collected for teachers to check out and use in their classrooms. This is an important function of a school library. We serve as information resources, and we support the information needs of all teachers, staff, and administrators. Developing and sharing this kind of resources is one great step in fulfilling that mission!
I tried to get some photos, but kids in costumes are very fast-moving! You can see some of them lined up here, waiting for their colleagues to finish parading and sharing their vocabulary words. It’s a little tough to make out the specific details, but you can just make out the yellow costume of the boy who was “light” all decked out in his glowing light bulbs! All the costumes were fantastic – these kids (and their parents) really did a lovely job of thinking through their words.
I tried to take pictures of people on stage, but they are just very cute looking blurs. So I grabbed this one of my library guide, Mary Berning, District Library Media Specialist for the Chisago Lakes Area Schools. Her word is so long it was hard to get in the photo: cruciverbalist, 
You can tell this school has neat stuff to do, because right out front is this excellent garden area! Yes, it was covered in snow at the time I visited; but just having a garden right there at the school is a very special thing.
I always like to see the library area clearly identified, and you can see how easy it is to see it all. (Okay, I confess I always get excited when I walk into a library for the first time!)
As with so many of our member libraries, you can see how these shelves are set up to be easily accessible by shorter patrons. See how easily kids can flip through these large books, without having to hold them all, and still see the cover art? So handy!!
Kids today all need to know how to use technology, and that means tech of all types and uses. It’s cool to see kids working to check out their own books here! Self-check machines are a great way to free up staff from time consuming work so they can spend more time working directly with the public!
I really like these snazzy shelves, all neatly read to be emptied by happy readers who check out all the books! And those chairs look so very comfortable!! This is a huge thing libraries need to think about: comfy seating encourages people to settle in and enjoy themselves. Libraries should be about positive experiences; good seating is a good start!
These are not unique to this library; but I think they are such a good idea! They are handy tools kids can use to help browse shelves in search of just the right book. They can also put these sticks into the shelves to mark the location of a book they are only going to use for a few minutes and then put back. Sometimes analog solutions are the best ones!
Art in libraries, and making books into art and looking beautiful, is always a good thing! Information is conveyed in all kinds of ways, and visual art can be a very powerful tool for sharing information. Plus, look at this: it’s so cute – I love it!