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American Association of School Librarians (AASL)

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Deadline: February 1

Submission Forms:

Overview

AASL's Best Digital Tools are recognized for fostering qualities of:

Innovation/Creativity

Active Participation

Collaboration

User-Friendly

Encourages Exploration

Information/Reference

Eligibility

Nominations may be submitted by developers, school librarians, or the general public. For a tool to qualify as "digital," it must be accessible remotely (website, app, etc.).

NEW - Tools that have been recognized previously may be submitted for repeat recognition. For tools that were recognized within three years or less (2020, 2021, or 2022) the committee will consider tools that demonstrate progress, improvements, or changes since the previous recognition. Progress is considered both in terms of new features or tools, but also for improvements in usability and accessibility.

Tools recognized prior to 2020 may be submitted for consideration without the need to demonstrate progress over time.

Preparation for Application

Incomplete applications will not reviewed. Please prepare the following information prior to submitting:

If your tool has received the Best Digital Tools recognition in the past three years (see lists below) you must submit any improvements, changes, or progress to the tool for consideration.

Committee members must receive full access to your tool including any features that are behind paywalls. Access must remain available through April 1.

If your tool has a pricing structure that is not available for public viewing an example of pricing must be included.

Questions

Allison Cline
Deputy Executive Director

2023

ChessKid.com is the scholastic extension of Chess.com, the #1 online chess site, and serves more than 3 million kids around the globe with lessons offered in English, Spanish, French, Korean and other languages. ChessKid is working to introduce chess education to as many students as possible worldwide and we pride ourselves as being the safest place for kids to learn and play chess in and out of the school. Media Specialists use ChessKid.com in their centers to help students enhance their creativity, improve their power of concentration, develop and expand critical thinking skills, boost memory and retention, and achieve superior academic performance. Find out if your school is eligible for FREE ChessKid accounts through our annual grant program at ChessKid.com. Privacy Policy Grades: K-12

2021

Diverse BookFinder is a catalog of trade picture books published or distributed in the U.S. since 2002 that includes Grades: K-3 (target) but picture books can be used widely:

1. A Unique Circulating Collection: Diverse BookFinder collects all depictions of Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC) in picture books. Anyone with a library card can check these books out through Interlibrary Loan.

2. A Search Tool: Diverse BookFinder is first-of-its-kind online, searchable database making it easier for educators to locate and explore picture books featuring BIPOC characters.

3. A Source of Critical Data: Diverse BookFinder provides real-time data on WHO (which BIPOC characters) is depicted and -- using unique book categories -- HOW they are depicted in diverse picture books.

4. A Collection Analysis Tool (CAT): Diverse BookFinder offers a free, online tool designed to help libraries diversify their picture book collections.

Grades: 1-10 (Scratch Jr. K-2)

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Best Digital Tools for Teaching & Learning

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Sponsored by AASL Deadline: February 1 Submission Forms: Developer/Vendor Submission Form School Librarian Nomination Form Overview AASL's Best Digital Tools are recognized for fostering qualities of: Innovation/Creativity Active Participation Collaboration User-Friendly Encourages Exploration Information/Reference Eligibility Nominations may be submitted by developers, school librarians, or the general public.

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Four Reasons to Care About Your Digital Footprint

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Make Digital Learning Accessible for All Students

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Integrating Technology with Blooms Taxonomy 

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Integrating Technology with Blooms Taxonomy 

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Creating authentic learning experiences for students is an essential element in online course delivery. Through recent discussion instructors have inquired "How do we provide meaningful learning experiences for students using tools that are intrinsically motivating?" ² Questions as such imply the need to provide instructors with ". . . innovative ways of integrating technology that encourage higher-order thinking skills." ²

Research indicates that "Today's students, regardless of demographics, have shown an interest in digital opportunities to learn, and the range of Web 2.0 tools that make collaboration, innovation, and individual exploration possible is incredible." ² Practitioners within the field of education have thought of unique ways to connect digital tools with the framework of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, which has led to the emergence of a Digital Bloom's Taxonomy.
Bloom's Digital Taxonomy
The purpose of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy is to inform instructors of how to use technology and digital tools to facilitate student learning experiences and outcomes. It aims, "T o expand upon the skills associated with each level as technology becomes a more ingrained essential part of learning." The use of this adapted version and the examples of tools it provides focus "should not be on the tools themselves, but rather on how the tools can act as vehicles for transforming student thinking at different levels." ¹ Outlined below are the levels featured within Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Each level is accompanied by a description of its relevance and examples of digital tools that connect with this taxonomy framework.
Infographic Credit: Ron Carranza Summary
Connecting characteristics of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy is necessary for creating online learning activities that are in accordance with our students' needs. "Bloom's Digital Taxonomy helps us navigate through the myriad digital tools and make choices based on the kinds of learning experiences we want students to engage in." ² Selecting the most appropriate digital activity will depend on the activity's level of difficulty tied to the cognitive levels stated within Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. As K. A. Meyer writes, "Knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. In this way, we can begin to ascertain differences that will help instructors apply the right tool to the right learning goals." ³
References
¹ Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. (2015, January 15). Retrieved May 03, 2016, from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/blooms-digital-taxonomy

² Lightle, K. (2011). More than just the technology. Science Scope, 34 (9), 6-9.

³ Meyer, K. A. (2010). A comparison of Web 2.0 tools in a doctoral course. The Internet and Higher Education, (4), 226-232. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2010.02.002
Additional Resources
Center for Teaching - Bloom's Revised Taxonomy https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/

Fractus Learning - Bloom's Digital Taxonomy http://www.fractuslearning.com/2014/08/18/blooms-taxonomy-digital-print-table/

Global Digital Citizen's Foundation - Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Verbs https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/blooms-digital-taxonomy-verbs

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Integrating Technology with Bloom's Taxonomy - Teach Online

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Creating authentic learning experiences for students is an essential element in online course delivery. Learn how Bloom's Digital Taxonomy can assist you.

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Creating meaninngful work into the 21st Century

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Creating meaninngful work into the 21st Century

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Replacing VHS tapes with YouTube clips is probably not the ideal version of moving a classroom into the 21st century.

While that type of digital substitution may tick the boxes of education technology frameworks like SAMR, it doesn't always provide an opportunity for deep thinking and real-world learning.

So how do teachers actually create meaningful work and allow students real agency in a 21st century classroom?

EdSurge talked with Scott McLeod, associate professor of education leadership at the University of Colorado in Denver. He's the author of " Harnessing Technology for Deeper Learning," which explores how his "four shifts" protocol can help educators test whether their practices and pedagogies support the goals of learning in the digital age.

Listen to the discussion on this week's EdSurge On Air podcast. You can follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen.

The highlights below have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity (the best experience is the audio, so subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast wherever you listen).
EdSurge: Why did you write this book, and what did you learn from it?
McLeod: One of the things we're seeing is that a number of school systems now have these lofty 21st-century learning mission and vision statements and initiatives. They want their students to be critical thinkers, problem solvers,communicators, collaborators and globally fluent.

And then we start mixing in some of the social and emotional learning and all kinds of newer conversations and desired outcomes. The challenge is translating that into day-to-day practice. So I do a lot of work with schools all around the world and I see numerous places where they have these wonderful, visionary, forward-thinking mission statements and visions and then you walk in the classroom and it looks pretty much like it did 15, 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
Take me into a school that you've seen and describe that distance-between what leaders hope to do, and what the practice actually is.
We still see a lot of traditional practice. You're walking down the halls of the school, and you'll see a lot of teacher up front driving the learning, rather than student-directed learning. There might be teacher lecture, might be textbook-driven work. We do a lot of digital substitutions, so a lot of schools think they are doing more future-ready work simply because they insert technology into their process, but it's basically just the digital counterparts to the analog work. So the teacher used to lecture up front with a chalkboard; now it happens with a $3,000 interactive whiteboard. You used to hand out a paper worksheet; now you're downloading a document in Google docs and typing into it and submitting it back to your teacher in Google Classroom.

We used to watch VHS tapes on the television. Now we are watching a YouTube video, so the pedagogy hasn't changed that much. The technologies that we see taking off in most schools are the ones that closely replicate traditional institutional practice because they are the ones we can latch on to the most easily. They are the ones that disrupt our teaching and learning the least.
So there's this theory called SAMR, which is substitution, augmentation, modification and then finally redefinition.

Basically replication and transformation.
There is this idea that we have to climb up a scale. But isn't it hard to climb up that scale? Do people know how to move from, "Okay, I'm using my whiteboard just like that chalkboard" to being more thoughtful about what this means?
Well the challenge with SAMR, which is sort of the dominant framework for K-12 schools right now, is that it's a technology continuum, not a learning continuum.

In other words, the highest level of SAMR means that you're using technology to do things you couldn't otherwise do before. But you can do that, and it'd still be low-level learning. So take an activity like Mystery Skype for example. Mystery Skype is an activity where two classrooms try to guess each others' location within 20 questions. So that's actually not very deep learning.

It's fun, and it's engaging, and the technology allows you to connect to that other classroom somewhere else in real-time, which you couldn't do before. So it's high on the SAMR. But ultimately you just spent 50 minutes and you spent 50 to 60 kids' time guessing each other's location.
So let's take that activity. Can we make that activity a deeper learning experience, or is that one a bit of a dead end?
No, we can. That's what the book is all about. So the book introduces our "four shifts" protocol, and the idea is that if you want deeper learning to happen, if you want student agency to happen, if you want authentic work to happen, and if you want rich technology and infusion to happen as a lever to make those first three things occur, then the protocol can maybe help us accomplish that.

So we would take the Mystery Skype, for example, and we would look at the deeper-learning section, and we would ask the questions as diagnostics and we would say, for example, what evidence do we have? We always focus on claims and evidence. So if you're going to say critical thinking is present in this activity, where is it? If you're going to say that metacognition is present in this activity, where is it?

So the deeper learning section of the protocol has a collection of questions that you can ask yourself as diagnostics and then say, if we're trying to make deeper learning happen in this activity, where is it? And if it's not there, can we start redesigning toward those?

And hopefully with some colleagues, or an instructional coach, principal or tech integrationist, or somebody who can bounce some ideas around. So the idea is that we run down this set of questions in the deeper-learning section about Mystery Skype and see that most of our questions are answered "no."

What if we want a couple of those answers to be yes? How can we redesign this activity to get there? So now all of a sudden, we'd do things like, instead of them asking each other yes or no questions, we would maybe have them collaborate on shared issues in their communities. So now all of a sudden they're doing collaborative problem solving rather than merely guessing each others' location.
So, in other words where Mystery Skype is entirely focused on yes-or-no questions, I might be asking a series of questions, maybe around, what's the water like in your community?
No, so we would actually have an authentic, meaningful dialogue with the other class. Instead of asking just yes-or-no questions, and we would identify some shared problems that both of our communities have and then we would get to work on those. Maybe collaborative work teams that spanned both classrooms. So now I've got two kids in classroom A working with two kids in classroom B and they're working on, say, how can we address water quality issues in our community? And then two other kids in classroom A are working with three other kids in classroom B and their issue is, how do we decrease the number of people who are hungry in our community. It's meaningful work.

So the transformation, in this example, would not be just guess your location. Let's actually work together on meaningful work. So we transform the task to something that's more authentic.
You said there were four shifts. Can you tell us quickly what those shifts are?
Yes, so one of them is the shift from recall and regurgitation to deeper learning or higher-level learning.
So that's what we were just talking about.
Yeah. The second shift would be the shift from teacher- and system-directed work to more student agency, where students have the opportunity to have more control and ownership of their own learning path so they really become those lifelong learners we say we want.

The third shift is around authenticity of the work, so that instead of being isolated, disconnected classrooms, how do we connect kids to the real world around them-locally, globally, digitally-so that they stop asking us why they need to know things and why they need to care about things that we ask them to do. Because now they see those connections, meaning and relevance.

Then the fourth shift is the shift from analog to digital, and that's important because the information landscape is so different these days. But it's also important because you can do deeper and more authentic work and give kids agency with tech in ways that you simply can't with analog spaces.
You've developed these ideas through your work with schools. How many schools have you been in?
Hundreds, thousands.
Tell me one story that you've seen, perhaps one school that you've worked with that has made this journey. What were they like and where did they go?
So one of my favorite schools is called Iowa Big. It's in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Students spend half their day at Iowa Big and half the day at their mothership high school. When they're at Iowa Big, they're working on projects that come from their community, such as local nonprofits, government agencies or local companies that basically say, we have things that we want to get done. Projects that we want to accomplish. They then put some high school youth on these tasks. . And it's in this amazing place where kids are redesigning schools with local architects. They're building aquatic drones. They're creating utensils for amputees. They're creating the community's first entrepreneurship conference for girls and women. I mean, just all these sorts of authentic community projects where the kids get a chance to do real-world work, side by side, with people in the community, as a complement to their more ordinary school experiences at their mothership high school.
Last question: How does this work from a teacher's point of view? We've heard a lot of talk recently about there are teachers that jump into this and they can't wait to do this. Then there are teachers who think, "Oh, my God. This is a lot of work. I'm changing all my practices. Do I really need to go down this path?" Tell me a little bit about the spectrum of teachers.
I think we always have a few teachers who are ready to jump in immediately and go. I think you have that next group of teachers who might be interested but doesn't know how. And of course you have the small group of skeptics who aren't very interested at all.

The biggest challenge for teachers is really around the dynamics of agency. More than anything else, that seems to be the sticking point-whether or not we want to give up control and hand it over to our students. It's sort of about control and ownership and agency over what you do, and we violate that on an hourly basis in every school, everywhere. And so it's about this idea that we have to turn things over to kids and let them drive their learning and make mistakes because it's part of the process, instead of controlling everything so tightly [because] we just have these freakish control needs where we're unwilling to let our students actually drive their own learning process.

But when we do, it's always, always amazing.

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How to Move From Digital Substitution to 'Deeper Learning' - EdSurge News

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Replacing VHS tapes with YouTube clips is probably not the ideal version of moving a classroom into the 21st century. While that type of digital substitution may tick the boxes of education technology frameworks like SAMR, it doesn't always provide an opportunity for deep thinking and real-world learning.

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by TeachThought Staff

In one sentence, Bloom's Taxonomy is a hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills that can, among countless other uses, help teachers teach, and students learn.

For example, Bloom's Taxonomy can be used to:

create assessments

frame discussions

plan lessons (see 249 Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs For Critical Thinking)

evaluate the complexity of assignments

design curriculum maps

develop online courses project-based learning (often through project-based learning ideas)

self-assessment

See How To Teach With Bloom's Taxonomy for more reading.

A Brief History Of Bloom's Taxonomy Revisions

Bloom's Taxonomy was created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, published as a kind of classification of learning outcomes and objectives that have, in the more than half-century since, been used for everything from framing digital tasks and evaluating apps to writing questions and assessments.

The original sequence of cognitive skills was Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The framework was revised in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, yielding the revised Bloom's Taxonomy. The most significant change to the Cognitive Domain was the removal of 'Synthesis' and the addition of 'Creation' as the highest level of Bloom's Taxonomy. And being at the highest level, the implication is that it's the most complex or demanding cognitive skill-or at least represents a kind of pinnacle for cognitive tasks.

See also 100 Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs For Critical Thinking

How Bloom's Taxonomy Is Useful For Teachers

In a separate post, we're going to cover exactly how Bloom's can be used by teachers. There are many reasons for the popularity of Bloom's Taxonomy (that likely deserve an article of their own to explore). For now, it's clear that many educators love Bloom's because, among other virtues, it gives them a way to think about their teaching-and the subsequent learning of their students.

As mentioned above, the framework can be used to create assessments, evaluate the complexity of assignments, increase the rigor of a lesson, simplify an activity to help personalize learning, design a summative assessment, plan project-based learning, frame a group discussion, and more. Because it simply provides an order for cognitive behaviors, it can be applied to almost anything. (You can see one example here-one of our teaching materials that combined Bloom's Taxonomy with common digital tasks.)

The image above visually demonstrates the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy as a spectrum rather than a hierarchy to allow for room for the 'power verbs' that can act as synonyms (and thus activity ideas) for teachers planning lessons and units.

There are six levels in Bloom's Taxonomy (the initialism RUAAEC may be useful to recall the levels).

The 6 Levels of Bloom's Taxonomy

1. The first level is to Remember.

Example activities at the Remembering level: memorize a poem, recall state capitals, remember math formulas

2. The second level is to Understand.

Example activities at the Understanding level: organize the animal kingdom based on a given framework, illustrate the difference between a rectangle and a square, summarize the plot of a simple story

3. The third level is to Apply.

Example activities at the Application level: use a formula to solve a problem, select a design to meet a purpose, reconstruct the passage of a new law through a given government/system

4. The fourth level is to Analyze.

Example activities at the Analysis level: identify the 'parts of' democracy, explain how the steps of the scientific process work together, identify why a machine isn't working

5. The fifth level is to Evaluate.

Example activities at the Evaluation level: make a judgment regarding an ethical dilemma, interpret the significance of a given law of physics, illustrate the relative value of a technological innovation in a specific setting-a tool that helps recover topsoil farming, for example.

6. The sixth and highest level is to Create.

Example activities at the Creation level: design a new solution to an 'old' problem that honors/acknowledges the previous failures, delete the least useful arguments in a persuasive essay, write a poem based on a given theme and tone

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What Is Bloom's Taxonomy? A Definition For Teachers

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Bloom's Taxonomy is a hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills that can, among countless other uses, help teachers teach and students learn.

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"Justin the Librarian"

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LIBRARY CURRENCY

Doesn't the idea of of a library currency get you excited? I can almost envision the BENSON BUCKS that my library (Benson Memorial Library, hence the BENSON BUCKS name) may adopt as our form of library currency.

Imagine visiting your public library and planning on it just being a visit where you grab a few books and maybe at some point take a load off your feet and read a magazine because there's really nice air conditioning in the space. You expect this to be an inward visit, but you overhear a conversation: someone is on the public computer and is perplexed by the task in front of them. You know what they're dealing with, so with kindness in your heart you get up and offer assistance. You get that person to where they need to be. A librarian sees what is happening and in turn they decide to reward you with some library currency. This currency could be used to do a number of things: pay off fines, purchase a book from the book sale, pay for a fax or copy, etc.
The two ideas behind library currency are:

1. The desire to reward good behaviors. We need more kindness in the world, and for kindness to continue to grow it needs to be rewarded. The creation of library currency allows those good deeds to be rewarded in a small way.

2. Is your library one of those places that just can't go fine free yet? Library currency gives your library a way to help with library fines while at the same time accomplishing another goal: promoting kindness in the community.

Over the next few months I'll be looking into BENSON BUCKS for my library. I've got some ideas kicking around in my head as to what it looks like and what it can be used for. Once I pull that together, I'll present the idea to my board and go from there.

BILLBOARDS

I was driving down I-79 towards Pittsburgh earlier this week and I saw a giant billboard advertising something really dumb. I can't recall what the billboard was endorsing, but I remember feeling like it was a waste of space and energy. In general billboards are horrible ( 4 states don't allow them!) but for most states in the USA they're everywhere and a part of our lives. How could we make them better? Why not advertise libraries?

I'm not thinking about how we can advertise our own libraries. I know there are a few billboards here in Titusville and I may look into that, but here I'm thinking about the bigger picture. Why don't we get something simple like "Visit Your Local Library" up on these billboards? It doesn't have to be part of some huge coordinated campaign with matching fonts and a marketing strategy and some national organization behind it. It can be a simple message that does nothing more than remind the people that drove by it that libraries exist and they're here for them.

My guess for the reason as to why we're not advertising on billboards is simple: it's too expensive. While I don't have any costs, I'm guessing we're dealing with larger sums of money that most of us or our libraries don't have. I'm going to dig deeper for my area starting here. I got to this by searching for "billboards in Pennsylvania" and this was one of the first hits.

THE SUMMER READING TREEHOUSE

Every once in awhile I get the urge to completely reinvent the Summer Reading Program ( got it this year). I recognize that this is a program that no matter what goes on that we just have to do, but I refuse to accept the fact that every year it has to be the same thing. If we're going to remain relevant we're going to have to try new things.

One of the ideas in my head right now is what I'm calling the Summer Reading Treehouse. I'm calling it this because 1) Treehouses are awesome and 2) When you're in a treehouse you feel like you're in some really cool club and 3) Who does want to be in some cool club? I mean that's why secret societies exist am I right? Being in a treehouse make you feel like you're included in something really awesome, and I feel that that feeling is something that is lacking very much in summer reading programs. I want the summer reading program to be something that people want to be involved in because they think it's great, not because they're forced to do it or there's some kind of prize at the end. It needs to be a club that people in your community want to join.

While I don't have all of my ideas together yet, here's the basic idea: carve out a specific area in your library. This space will look different for every library. For my library, it is most likely going to be our community room that becomes the treehouse. Once you have that space, set it up with different activities (call them stations if it makes sense in your librarian brain) that are special and unique to the treehouse. For my library, that'll be some video games, 3D Printing, different creative areas, and a chill out/reading/relaxing space for kids only. How do you get into the treehouse? You sign up for the Summer Reading Program. That's your ticket into the treehouse, but there's more. With your ticket into treehouse, there are levels that unlock certain rewards or areas. Read for 5 hours and you unlock a new area. Do something else and you get to another level. It's a club, a secret society, a special place, and a unique experience wrapped up in one. It gives the Summer Reading Program a breath of new life. Stay tuned for more details as they develop.

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LIBRARY CURRENCY Doesn't the idea of of a library currency get you excited? I can almost envision the BENSON BUCKS that my library (Benson Memorial Library, hence the BENSON BUCKS name) may adopt as our form of library currency. Imagine visiting your public library and planning on it just being a visit where you grab a...

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Instantly access over 40,000 of the best books & videos for kids on Epic

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Around the Library

Here's what's happened over the last 28 days. More recent changes.

About the Project

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. More

Just like Wikipedia, you can contribute new information or corrections to the catalog. You can browse by subjects, authors or lists members have created. If you love books, why not help build a library?

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Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Read, borrow, and discover more than 3M books for free.

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Transform static lesson delivery with game-based activities, formative assessments, and student collaboration.

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BrainPOP - Animated Educational Site for Kids - Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health, and Technology

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School Librarians United with Amy Hermon

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Tune in as Amy Hermon tackles the issues and challenges school librarians face everyday.