This summer, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2017. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration, and encourage discovery and curiosity.
Heuristic Shakespeare: The Tempest is the product of Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate working together to bring the plays of Shakespeare to life. “Shakespeare wrote his plays to be seen and heard, not read. Heuristic Shakespeare apps put you face to face with his characters at the heart of each play. It makes his language and references easily accessible and helps you understand each play from the inside out.” The app includes in-depth notes on the text, the history of The Tempest, and historical background on Shakespeare.
This review of the app from PC Mag gives an overview of the app as well as a pro/con list.
Level: Middle School
Platform: iOS
Cost: $5.99
Watch a behind-the-scenes video of the app being created here:
Libraries are filled with all kinds of projects, and library people are pretty naturally helpful people. So when there are big, potentially interesting tasks that people could help with, the call goes out. If you want to do a little transcription work, and maybe learn a few basics of digital projects, this is a project you can participate in too!
Chicago’s venerable Newberry Library is asking for the public’s help with what might be the coolest mass transcription project to ever hit our radar. The research library has uploaded to its website a handful of texts that date back at least to the 17th century—including real-life post-medieval manuscripts about magic and witchcraft—that users can help transcribe, translate and edit.
“Voice is natural, voice is human. That’s why we’re fascinated with creating usable voice technology for our machines. But most of that technology is locked up in a few big corporations and isn’t available to the majority of developers. We think that stifles innovation so we’re launching Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.
Read a sentence to help our machine learn how real people speak. Check its work to help it improve. It’s that simple.”
Libraries offer great resources to their veteran patrons, so when we saw the work this nonprofit is doing in regards to serving veterans, we thought we should share!
Vets Who Code was created by veteran and programmer Jerome Hardaway. The organization’s goal is to help veterans become programmers and also to challenge some stigmas out there about veterans and the workforce.
“Launched in 2014, Vets Who Code is a non-profit dedicated to filling the nations technical skills gap with America’s best. We achieve this by using technology to connect and train veterans remotely in web development in order to close the digital talent gap and ease career transition for military veterans and to give military spouses skills to provide stability as they move to support their families. We believe that those who serve in uniform can be the digital economy’s most productive and innovative assets. Vets Who Code prepares them to enter the civilian work force with tangible skills for new careers.”
Check out this podcast interview with Hardaway, where they discuss some of the challenges he has faced, such as “reentering civilian life at the height of the Great Recession, how Vets Who Code was born, the specific assets vets bring to programming and the tech world, and how they overcome the challenges and stereotypes they face.”
Since you are reading this, you are probably a library person, and you probably like books! But not everyone around us may understand our enjoyment of books and reading. Sometimes we just want to stay home and curl up with a stack of library books! Thankfully, there are some awesome online communities that you can connect with through social media that will appreciate and encourage your bookish ways.
This article from Book Riot details all the different ways you can connect to fellow bookish friends online, including book blogs, book Twitter, Goodreads, Bookstagram, and more!
You can check out these links to see which accounts you may be interested in following:
And don’t forget to include hashtags in your posts, so you can interact with fellow book loving people! Good ones to use include: #books, #bookstagram, #bookblogger, #amreading, #yalit, #bookshelfie
Did you see your favorite book-related account mentioned? If not, leave us a comment so we can check it out!
Partnering with libraries for visioning, advocating, and educating
This summer, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2017. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration, and encourage discovery and curiosity.
Libraries offer great resources to their veteran patrons, so when we saw the work this nonprofit is doing in regards to serving veterans, we thought we should share!
Since you are reading this, you are probably a library person, and you probably like books! But not everyone around us may understand our enjoyment of books and reading. Sometimes we just want to stay home and curl up with a stack of library books! Thankfully, there are some awesome online communities that you can connect with through social media that will appreciate and encourage your bookish ways.