Kimberly Hirsh

In Social Media for Social Good, former social media consultant Heather Mansfield, principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech 2.0, provides a guidebook for nonprofits entering the social media world for the first time. Mansfield divides the Web into three eras: the Static Web (1.0), the Social Web (2.0), and the Mobile Web (3.0). She explains the importance and value of online tools in each era, explaining that each builds on the era before it. She also identifies specific tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, and gives best practices for using these tools. At the end of the book, she includes “Your Nonprofit Tech Checklist,” a step-by-step map for planning your organization’s social media strategy.

Mansfield provides a wealth of information and enhances her own advice by providing Nonprofit Examples of Excellence at the end of each chapter and a “Google This!” section with recommended search terms for more information and examples. Social Media for Social Good has both breadth and depth. I purchased it to support my work with the Durham Savoyards as we enter our 50th Anniversary year; the time seemed ripe for launching our organization into Web 2.0 and beyond. Mansfield focuses on suggestions that at first glance would work only for large non-profits with the budget to hire a social media manager, but with some tweaking, the work can be spread across a range of volunteers.

I highly recommend this book not only for anyone working with a 501(c)3, but also for anyone working in education. The principles are applicable to any organization that relies on external participation and support to succeed at its mission. I think they are especially relevant in the field of education, where providing readily-accessible evidence of the good work we do helps us demonstrate the need for continued funding and personnel support. For example, Mansfield suggests having the Board or staff of your nonprofit create a “Thank You” video for supporters. At a school library, you could have students create a video to thank donors or volunteers. In a classroom, you could create a Flickr pool for your Donors Choose project and post the URL in the project description so donors could follow your students’ progress through the project. Social Media for Social Good provides many more suggestions and best practices that will enhance your organization’s online marketing strategy. Check it out at your library or buy it today!

Social Media for Social Good by Heather Mansfield McGraw-Hill 2011 ISBN 007177081X

Storytime: My 17-year-old brother is a student at an online high school.  (I think it’s TRECA but I’m not 100% sure of that.)  Sometime last spring, my mother described to me a challenge he’d had when working on an assignment in his history class.  The teacher had given him a question of causality: What were the reasons that a particular historical event had happened?  (I can’t remember what event in particular; I think it probably had to do with the start of a war.)  The teacher had instructed the students to “do some research” and “write a paper” about it.  The teacher didn’t provide suggested resources for the research or guidance on the research process.    Without this kind of guidance, my brother  spent hours sorting through Google results and ended up writing an unfocused paper that chronicled every possible cause he could find, rather than a cohesive paper making an argument for a particular cause or related set of causes. I said to my mother, “Well, doesn’t he have a school librarian that he could ask for help on assignments like that?”

“No,” she replied.  “They only just got a case worker for IEPs.”  As a (at the time, future) school librarian, this made me sad.  Since that conversation, I’ve been considering what it would look like for students like my brother to receive library services.

The North Carolina Virtual Public School, as I understand it, operates on a different model than TRECA does.  It is not a full-time academy, but rather provides opportunities for students across the state who might not otherwise be able to take certain classes.  Theoretically, students enrolled in NCVPS have access to school librarians at their home schools and would be able to ask for their assistance.  But, at least in my experience as a middle school librarian, collaboration between the distance teacher and the school librarian is rare and could present significant challenges (mostly due to time constraints; in a world of Skype and GoToMeeting, I think actually setting up the communication would be pretty simple).

For this reason, I think there need to be dedicated virtual school librarians, who work exclusively with teachers and students involved in distance learning.  As of 2009, “not one online high school [had] a school librarian position” (Darrow, 79).  Because of this, we don’t know exactly what such a position would look like.  University libraries, however, provide some promising models with e-learning librarians and distance  learning services.

Based on an informal survey of job descriptions for university librarians serving distance learning students and instructors, plus my own brainstorming based on guidelines like AASL’s Empowering Learners and NCDPI’s IMPACT, here are the services I imagine a VSL might provide:

• collaboration with teachers, either synchronous or asynchronous, to create information literacy lessons embedded in their courses, to assist with the research process, or to provide lists of resources
• consulting with students, to help them through the research process and help them identify relevant and reliable resources
• providing/managing a virtual space where students could create & share their work (blogs? wikis? I'm not sure)
• creating free-standing information literacy lessons for commonly-addressed issues
• participating in classroom discussion fora to answer questions
• holding office hours for virtual reference/unplanned consultations

References

Darrow, R. (2009.) School libraries are essential: Meeting the virtual access and collaboration needs of the 21st-century learner and teacher. Knowledge Quest, 37(5), 78-83.

When you are building a collection and especially if you need to defend your collection against challenges, it is important to take into account the developmental needs of your user base.  This is especially important at the school library, where discussions about what is or is not appropriate can become heated.

When considering the developmental appropriateness of materials in my collections, here are the resources I use:

Stages of Literary Appreciation from Literature for Today’s Young Adults by Alleen Pace Nilsen, et al. (PDF of first chapter provided by the publisher) Nilsen and her colleagues identify seven stages of literary appreciation, from birth through adulthood.  When using this to build or defend your collection, it is important to remember that we retain characteristics from the earlier stages as we grow into the later ones.  For example, in late elementary school, we may want to lose ourselves in the fantasy of literature.  In middle school, we may want to find ourselves reflected in the books we read.  Even though we now want to find reflections of ourselves, our desire for escape and fantasy has not disappeared.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Facts for Families.  The AACAP has created an excellent set of resources on a variety of topics of interest to the families of children and adolescents.  At their website you can download a complete set of these resources, search them by keyword, or browse them by keyword or in the order in which they were released.  Two I have found especially helpful are Normal Adolescent Development - Middle School and Early High School Years and Normal Adolescent Development - Late High School - Years and Beyond.

Developmental Tasks and Education by Robert J. Havighurst.  Havighurst identifies six stages of development and tasks that occur within them.  The quickest overview of these is at Wikipedia.

Developmental Assets from the Search Institute.  For a variety of age groups, the Search Institute has identified 40 developmental assets.  These assets describe what children and young adults need to be successful and to avoid high-risk behaviors.  While the other resources have identified characteristics of your students, these identify resources that enhance their lives.  This can be useful for advocacy more generally and for selecting books where characters have and benefit from the developmental assets or do not have them and must work to overcome their situation.

Having these resources available makes it easy to justify the inclusion of works in your collection without having to rely exclusively on your personal opinion or even your professional judgment.

Many thanks to Sandra Hughes-Hassell for introducing me to these resources in her Young Adult Literature and Related Materials course.

Since I’m now working as a middle school librarian, I feel like what I read is inextricably tied to how I work. Because of that, I’ve imported all the posts from my lectitans reading blog to this blog.  From now on, all reading posts will be made here in the category “Reading.”  I will not make any new posts at either of the earlier lectitans sites.

Here’s a complete list of this week’s interviews:

Monday:

Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

Tuesday:

Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Wednesday:

Sarah Stevenson at Chasing Ray Emily Howse at Bildungsroman Ashley Hope-Perez at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich at Vivian Lee Mahony (Hip Writer Mama)

Thursday: Tessa Gratton at Writing & Ruminating Micol Ostow at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Maria Padian at Bildungsroman Genevieve Cote at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast Vera Brosgol at lectitans

Friday:

Genevieve Valentine at Shaken & Stirred Stacy Whitman at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Alyssa B. Sheinmel at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Matthew Cody and Aaron Starmer at Mother Reader

Vera Brosgol is the creator of Anya’s Ghost, a young adult graphic novel about Anya, a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to be normal. When Anya falls down a well and meets the ghost of a girl who died a century ago, she quickly discovers that her new friend can help her with her social life and her schoolwork. As is always the case, this friendship is more complicated than she initially realizes.

Vera was kind enough to answer seven questions for me for the SBBT.

Why did you choose to create Anya’s Ghost in black and white?

I honestly didn’t think it needed color. Full-color can really add a lot to a story especially when it takes place in an interesting location or fantastic world, but for this particular one I feel like it would’ve been superfluous. The monochromatic palette served the mood of the story, I think. And it would’ve made the coloring take twice as long.

In addition to creating comics and graphic novels, you are a professional animator. In Anya’s Ghost and the art on your website, you create a sense of movement in still images. How do the skills required for comics and animation overlap?

I’m actually a story artist rather than an animator, though I went to school for animation.  [K: My bad!]  In college I learned that the part of the process I enjoyed the most was the storyboarding part, so that’s what I went into. I didn’t have the patience for animating! I think animation made me a much faster and more flexible artist - when you have to do thousands of drawings you can’t fuss with them too much. It also taught me how to be efficient in communicating with a drawing. I started focusing less on making a pretty picture and more on telling some kind of story with it. That definitely carried over into my illustration and comics work. I feel like the same part of my brain gets used for storyboarding and comics.

Like you, Anya came to America at the age of 5. A lot of Anya’s concerns over her appearance and behavior are magnified by the fact that she comes from a Russian family. How do you think having this extra level of being different affects common teenage concerns?

It’s just one more thing making life difficult. Anything that makes you in any way different from everyone else makes you a target, and when your skin is bad and your clothes are fitting weird you don’t want to pile anything else on top of that. I didn’t have a hard time about being Russian but I was constantly aware that my home life didn’t exactly match that of my friends, and a part of me definitely wished it did. Of course it depends on where you live. I went to a high school in Brooklyn where there was a huge immigrant population and being from another country didn’t cause problems - at most it just dictated what group you’d be friends with.

While Anya’s worries are common to most teenagers, Anya’s Ghost adds a supernatural element to issues of friendship and peer pressure. What do you think is powerful about using the supernatural to tell this kind of story?

Part of the reason I added the paranormal element to the story was to make it more fun for me! Regular old school drama is all well and good but I don’t really get excited unless there’s something weird or creepy going on. And Emily served as a way to reflect all of Anya’s bad traits back at her, so that she could get a good honest look at herself. That would’ve been possible to do with a non-ghost character but it made sense for me to do that with someone who literally didn’t have a life of their own.

On your website, you feature fan art for other works such as Scott Pilgrim and The Hunger Games. Who are some of your favorite artists and writers? What about their work inspires you?

I’m a big fan of Fred Moore and Earl Oliver Hurst, both of whom drew lovely lady illustrations. Jillian Tamaki is one of my favorite modern illustrators - I love her embroidered Penguin covers and her amazing ink work. There’s a Czech illustrator named Stepan Zavrel who did the most amazing watercolors - I’d love to get some of that looseness into my own work. And I’m friends with some phenomenal artists - Jon Klassen, Chris Turnham, Steve Wolfhard, Emily Carroll… so I am constantly inspired by them. Writer-wise, I really like Haruki Murakami’s books. Before that I read Dracula and Geek Love. Right now I’m working through the Song of Ice & Fire books. I usually want to draw a picture to go along with whatever I’m reading just to get it out of my head!

A lot of your art, such as your collaborative Tumblr blog Draw this dress! and your many circus-themed pieces, draws on vintage imagery. What is it about these images from the past that appeals to you?

I love fashion. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was little (as well as an animator and a children’s book illustrator and probably a vet or something). Though really I think what I meant was costume design - I love anything that tells a story and clothes can absolutely do that. Vintage clothes tell you about the kind of person who wore them, what their life was like, what was going on in the world at the time… it’s really easy and fun to insert a character into them, which is what Draw This Dress is all about. Modern fashion can be a lot of fun too but there’s definitely more variety if you’re borrowing from the past.

When you were in high school, you created the webcomic Return to Sender. What did you learn from this experience that has helped you in your career?

Haha! I kind of learned what not to do. I did that comic before school and the whole thing was a very fussily-drawn, poorly-planned experiment. I generally knew where the story was going but putting it up online one page at a time was not the best way to do tell it - once a page was up it was up, there was no going back and reworking things to improve the story. Maybe for a comic strip that would’ve been okay but I was essentially trying to make a graphic novel. It reached a point where it had gotten sloppy and I got too busy with school to deal with fixing it so I just stopped. I’m much more careful with plotting now and try to think of a book as a whole, rather than a series of installments. And I stopped using those darn Micron pens!

Thanks, Vera!

The fun continues: Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Hi there! It’s time once again for our semiannual (because we do one in winter, too, see?) smorgasbord of interviews with authors and illustrators. Every day this week, I’ll be posting links to interviews elsewhere, and then on Thursday, I’ll be sharing my very own interview with Vera Brosgol. Enjoy!

Today’s Interviews: Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

PLN Challenge #3 is all about using Twitter to build your PLN.  I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now, and it has been the focal point of my PLN.  I feel that Twitter is an excellent tool for finding resources and connecting with others.

Many people think that Twitter is a service for broadcasting the minutiae of your day, the classic example being an announcement of the contents of your lunch. I’ve found it to be much more than that, but it can take some time to find the right people to follow. As I mentioned in my first challenge post, Darren Rowse’s excellent TwiTip blog provides a list of the top educators to follow. The Edublog Awards provide another excellent source for discovering potential colleagues.

An objection I often hear is, “Where will I find the time for this?”, followed by “How will I keep up?” The beauty of Twitter is that it requires very little commitment to be useful. My basic Twitter routine goes like this:

1. Open up the TweetDeck extension in Google Chrome.
2. Scroll back until I reach a post that says it was posted 2 hours ago.
3. Read from that point forward, clicking on interesting links as I go.

When I find something particularly moving or interesting, I retweet it so that anybody following me who may have missed it can take a look. I never read tweets that are more than an hour old. This eliminates the concern over catching up. Good stuff gets shared repeatedly, so if I’ve missed something, I trust that it will pop up again. Twitter is kind of like a party or a conference that happens all the time: when you’re there, it’s fun and enriching, but when you’re not, there’s no need to worry.

What is your Twitter routine? Do you have any limits like my 1-hour limit?

The PLN Challenge continues!  The Teacher Challenge blog asked us to answer two questions:

1. What do you hope to learn more about with respect to your PLN in the coming weeks?

In every form of professional development - in-service provided by the county, conferences, PLNs - I have a habit of getting very excited about all the new ideas to try, and then filing the ideas away for later.  Later rarely comes, of course.  I’m looking forward to finding out how other people manage all of the exciting news that comes their way with their PLNs.  There are great blog posts, lesson plans, and communities out there.  How do people organize the immense amount of information they encounter every day?  How can I do likewise, and then put these ideas into practice rather than letting them lie fallow?

2. What have you learned with creating your PLN that you wish that someone had told you before and what tips do you have to share?

Relax. This is the big tip I have for past-me and for everyone else building a PLN.  Information moves quickly.  The point of a PLN is not to be that dreaded “one more thing” teachers are always talking about having put on their plate.  It’s to energize and excite.  To improve.  But it’s your thing, which means you get to figure out how best to use your time.  I’m the kind of person who reads a magazine cover-to-cover, starts novel series with the first book, and will read six years’ worth of blog archives all at one blog.  A completist, if you will.

That’s not how PLNs work.  If I were to spend all of my time catching up on my Twitter stream, I’d get nothing else done.  So I need to relax.  You might, too.  The PLN is there when we need it.  It’s a resource, not an obligation.  Sometimes we’ll be able to help others in our PLN and sometimes we’ll need their help.  We can jump in or out as time allows.

What about you?  What do you want to learn about PLNs?  What advice can you give?

Over on The Book of Faces, I noticed that Edublogs is hosting a PLN challenge - 30 days to build and/or grow your personal learning network.  Fresh out of school, still with a bit of enthusiasm, and not yet busied by the responsibilities of a professional position, I think now is the perfect time for me to join in.

The Question Everyone (Including Myself) Asks: What does PLN really mean?

I’ve been building my PLN since fall of 2008, though I’ve torn it down and rebuilt it a couple of times now.  Essentially, PLN is a blanket way of referring to all the different methods we have of learning new things by interacting with other people.  For me, blogs have always been a big part of that.  In 2008 I added Twitter.  I’ve tried Nings but that format is not very intuitive to me, so I just dip my toes in and out.

That said, I’ve never really been able to wrap my brain around PLN as a concept.  So in my head it looks like this: People I Follow On Twitter + Authors of Blogs I Follow + Colleagues from School + My Husband + My Dad + Any Other Resource I Happen Upon = My PLN.  (In case you’re wondering why my mom isn’t on there, it’s because she’s not in libraries/education/academia.)  It’s big and messy and organic, and The Internet tells me that’s okay.  My librarian-brain disagrees but I’m working with her to move through this.

So, how did I decide who to follow on Twitter and blogs? (Because how I obtained my dad and school colleagues is pretty obvious, and how I got my husband is personal info not suited to a professional blog…)

First, over at TwiTip, Darren Rowse shared a list of the Top 10 Educators to follow on Twitter.  Then, of course, I followed the old advice of looking at who those people follow and who followed them.

Next, as part of my School Library program, I was required to follow the blogs of luminaries like Joyce Valenza, Buffy Hamilton, Doug Johnson, Will Richardson, and David Warlick (most of these folks are on Twitter, too).  These blogs post links to other resources which expand my network even further.  I don’t remember how I found 8-Bit Library, but I’m so glad I did, because JP and Justin are my heroes.

But here’s what I think is the coolest way I found people to add to my PLN…

And it’s something I haven’t seen/heard anybody else talk about yet.  At conferences, I’m in danger of being a wallflower.  Sitting in the back of the room for presentations, eating by myself, this sort of thing.  The bigger the conference, the more likely this is to happen.  So when I went to ALA’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. last year, this was a big risk.  Especially when my husband and my friend Katy weren’t around.

BUT! Because of my PLN, this never happened.  I was wandering between sessions, all by my lonesome, when folks like JP Porcaro and Justin Hoenke (both of 8 Bit Library) would recognize me and we’d exchange greetings.  Then I’d do things like follow JP to the exhibit hall where we’d sit and chat about video games in libraries, followed by some wandering around until he introduced me to people he knew, like Ed Garcia and Jenn Wann Walker.  Or I’d meet up with him in the Networking Uncommons and happen to find him talking to people like Evelyn Bussell, who is actually local to me and had just returned from lunch with my advisor.

Because of my PLN in virtual space, I felt more comfortable in the physical space at ALA, and met new people who I then added to my PLN.  It was amazing.  Especially the part where Buffy Hamilton and I compared shoes.

What’s next?

This year I won’t be attending the ALA Annual Conference.  But you can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on #ala11 on Twitter and soaking up everything I can from my PLN.  I trust them to let me know what new connections are worth making.

I have recently published my Master’s Paper here in my portfolio.  This paper won the Dean’s Achievement Award for Best Master’s Paper.  I will soon revise it for submission to School Library Media Research.

The Transformational Leadership Practices of National Board Certified School Librarians in North Carolina

 Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon’s new historical action novel, The Secret Journeys of Jack London: THE WILD, hits stores today.  The authors and illustrator Greg Ruth will be touring blogs every day for the next couple of weeks to share their stories.

I asked Tim to share a bit with us about his research process.  Here’s what he had to say:

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects about writing this book was the research.

I usually don’t research that much.  The book I’m writing right now is a fantasy novel, so I get to make stuff up.  On the island of Skythe there are birds called merrows, herd creatures called hat-hat, fire-breathing creatures called lyons, stinging things called stark blights, and a god named Aeon.  That’s all made up stuff, and the world I create is inhabited by creatures and people that require no research … because none of them are real.  At least, until I’ve finished the novel and it’s published, whereupon I hope they come across as real to the readers.  That’s one of the great pleasures of writing a fantasy novel––the geography, flora, fauna, and sometimes even the rules of nature and physics are mine to do with as I will.  As I often like to say about my first fantasy novel, Dusk, I can have sentient tumbleweed without having to explain why.

That wasn’t the case with The Wild, of course.  And I discovered that I enjoyed the research process far more than I’d anticipated.

First, I had to start reading a load of Jack London material.  He’s a superb writer, so that was   a pleasure rather than a hardship.  It took me back to my teens, which was the last time I’d read The Call of the Wild. And I discovered books that I hadn’t read before, such as John Barleycorn, and enjoyed reading Jack London biographies.  But the real pleasure came from researching the period and place where the book was set––Alaska, and the Yukon, during the Gold Rush.

I knew a little about those times, but not much.  I had visions of people travelling comfortably into the wild, making huge gold strikes, and then returning home with their fortunes and futures secure, luggage loaded with gold and their skins a healthy sheen from the bracing weather.

The reality was far different, and far grimmer.  The journey itself to the site of the gold strikes was terribly harsh, taking months for most people to make their way across mountains and through forests, along rivers and across lakes, all the time struggling to survive the worst that nature could throw at them––drenching rains, snow, ice, and temperatures that would freeze your spit before it hit the ground.

Camps were set up along the trail, such as the landing place of Dyea and the inland town of Dawson, and many people only made it this far.  They were lawless places, where the law of gun and knife ruled.  Beyond, along trails like the Dead Horse Pass––so named because its treacherous slopes were littered with the bodies of hundreds of horses that had fallen and been left to die––men and women ventured into the Yukon in search of their fortunes.

Thousands of people formed the Gold Rush, but the sad truth of it is that few struck lucky.  Many died on their way to these base camps, and many more starved or froze to death in the wild.  Scurvy was rife, as during the frozen months food was scarce.

Jack London himself almost died during his time in the Yukon.  He returned with gold dust worth less than five dollars, loose teeth, a malnourished body, and memories and scars that would last him a lifetime.  His time in the wild informed the type of man he became, and although it was probably one of the harshest times of his life––in later life he would become wealthy from his writing, and live very comfortably indeed––it was also the most inspirational.  Much of his greatest work is about the land he found when he went in search of gold.  And who is to say he didn’t find more than he revealed?  Maybe he truly did bear terrible secrets about his time there, in the inhospitable, brutal landscapes of the Yukon.  The wild.

Thanks for sharing, Tim!

The Secret Journeys of Jack London Blog Tour For the next two weeks, authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon will be traveling through the blogs of YA/kidlit bloggers who are also teachers, librarians, and/or adventurers. Each tour stop will offer an exclusive piece of art from Greg Ruth, whose stunning illustrations give life to the characters, locations, and beasts throughout the book. Follow the tour:

Monday, February 28th Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th Rebecca’s Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th & Wednesday, March 9th Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Help spread the word about this exciting new series. Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

The blog tour for The Secret Journeys of Jack London: The Wild kicks off today with an interview with the authors over at Bildungsroman.

The Secret Journeys of Jack London Blog Tour For the next two weeks, authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon will be traveling through the blogs of YA/kidlit bloggers who are also teachers, librarians, and/or adventurers. Each tour stop will offer an exclusive piece of art from Greg Ruth, whose stunning illustrations give life to the characters, locations, and beasts throughout the book. Follow the tour:

Monday, February 28th Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th Rebecca’s Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th & Wednesday, March 9th Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Help spread the word about this exciting new series. Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

Are you ready to take a journey into the wild?

Bestselling authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon have teamed up to create THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON. Jack certainly lived a wild life, which inspired Golden & Lebbon to create this new book series based on his real-life travels. They’ve taken his true stories and his fiction and mixed in urban legends and myths of the time. While THE SECRET JOURNEYS series is fiction, not biography, the books are extremely well-researched, and spooky elements add another level of intrigue to the richly detailed stories.

The first book, THE WILD, will be released on Tuesday, March 1st. When seventeen-year-old Jack London travels to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, the path he treads is not at all what he expected. Along the way, he encounters kidnappers, traders, traitors, and a mysterious wolf. Jack must face the wild head-on in order to survive.

The buzz for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON just keeps getting louder. 20th Century Fox has acquired the film rights to the series. Garth Nix, author of the Abhorsen Trilogy, declared: “A masterful mix of gold, cold, supernatural creatures, and dread magic makes this a great action adventure story.” Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, calls THE WILD “A great old-school adventure novel and the best use of the Wendigo legend I’ve ever read.”

Authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon will launch a blog tour the day before the book’s release, beginning at Bildungsroman on Monday, February 28th and traveling through the blogs of YA/kidlit bloggers who are also teachers, librarians, and/or adventurers through Tuesday, March 8th. Each tour stop will offer an exclusive piece of art from Greg Ruth, whose stunning illustrations give life to the characters, locations, and beasts throughout the book.

Here’s the full schedule:

Monday, February 28th Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th Rebecca’s Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

Publishing details: THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON: THE WILD Written by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon Illustrated by Greg Ruth On sale: March 1st, 2011 Published by HarperCollins Childrens ISBN: 9780061863172

http://www.christophergolden.com http://www.timlebbon.net

My column in the January 2011 issue of School Library Monthly, entitled “Resolving the Quiet Crisis: Reading Apprenticeships in Middle and High Schools” and co-authored with Katelyn Browne and Elizabeth Koehler, is now available.

I have recently added a unit plan as an example of the type of instructional planning services I offer.

I created this monthly report for the school library media center where I completed my field experience:

Here are two video resources I created during my field experience:

Here are two more videos of me telling stories in my storytelling class. The volume in both is very quiet, so you’ll need to turn it up on your computer to get the full effect.

Welcome to my new home, here at my own domain.  LiveJournal was just not doing what I needed it to do anymore, and thus we have the new lectitans.

If you’re looking for posts on a particular topic, please check out the tag cloud at the right.  I haven’t settled yet on whether I’ll be using categories for new posts, so tags are the best way to navigate topically for now.

Coming soon: reviews of The Spymaster’s Lady and Rebecca.

 1. Angel: After the Fall, Volume 1, Brian Lynch
2. The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin
3. Hooked on Murder, Betty Hechtman
4. That Was Then, This Is Now, S. E. Hinton
5. Rumblefish, S. E. Hinton
6. Tex, S. E. Hinton
7. Vampire Kisses, Ellen Schreiber
8. Brazen Careerist, Penelope Trunk
9. Emma, Jane Austen (Audiobook, re-read)
10. The Ghost Belonged to Me, Richard Peck
11. Are You in the House Alone? Richard Peck
12. Just a Minute! A Trickster Tale and Counting Book, Yuyi Morales
13. Chidi Only Likes Blue: An African Book of Colors, Ifeoma Onyefulu
14. Superhero ABC, Bob McLeod
15. Black Cat, Christopher Myers
16. Going North, Janice N. Harrington
17. Heat Wave, Richard Castle
18. Stan Lee: Creator of Spider-Man, Raymond H. Miller
19. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
20. Amulet, Book 1: The Stonekeeper, Kazu Kibuishi
21. Magic Knight Rayearth, Vol. 1, CLAMP.
22. Food Matters, Mark Bittman
22. Feathers, Jacqueline Woodson
23. Which Way Freedom? Joyce Hansen
24. She’s All That! Poems About Girls, Belinda Hollyer (selector)
25. Creature Carnival, Marilyn Singer
26. Mirror, Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse, Marilyn Singer
27. Wind of a Thousand Tales, John Glore
28. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (begun in 2009)
29. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
31. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
32. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
33. The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
34. Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky, Elphinstone Dayrell
35. We Beat the Street: How a Friendship Pact Led to Success, Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, Rameck Hunt, with Sharon Draper
36. Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, Deborah Heiligman
37. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (audibook; re-read)
38. Coraline, Neil Gaiman (graphic novel version)
39. Persuasion, Jane Austen (audiobook)
40. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (audiobook)
41. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (audiobook, re-read)
42. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (audiobook)
43. The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole

Author and blogger Tanita S. Davis has set up a contest exclusively for homeschoolers to win a copy of her book, Mare’s War. Check it out!

Have you ever found that the cover of a book grossly misrepresented its contents, and that this misrepresentation seemed to keep the book from finding what would otherwise be its natural audience?  A bunch of bloggers have, which is why over at Bookshelves of Doom, Leila is sponsoring a cover design contest for Jenny Davidson’s, Ysabeau Wilce’s, and D. M. Cornish’s works, all of which fit in this category.

The contest is part of a larger multi-blog celebration of overlooked and/or misrepresented alternate history and steampunk books which will take place the week of December 13th.  Keep an eye out for more info as that week gets closer!

This review was written for my children’s literature class, so it addresses some concerns from a more professional perspective than many of my earlier reviews have.

Colman, P. (1997). Corpses, coffins, and crypts: A history of burial. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts demystifies a process which many children encounter for the first time in late elementary school: what happens to the body after a person dies. Penny Colman is an award-winning author of children’s non-fiction; while she is not an expert on burial practices, she is an expert on researching and presenting information.

This book, which will have a natural pull for spooky kids such as myself, is very straightforward in its approach. Colman first defines death and explains what exactly happens upon death. She then discusses various possibilities for what happens to a corpse, including medical uses, embalming, and creation. Next she discusses different containment options: urns, coffins, crypts, and mausoleums. She goes on to describe burial sites and celebrations, finishing with a discussion of death as portrayed in the arts and everyday life.

The book’s intended audience is readers age 9 - 12, although School Library Journal recommends it for grades 6 and up. I think it would appeal to an advanced 4th or 5th grader. The text is very clear. Colman frames her discussions of history and science with stories of her own experiences with death and those of her friends and acquaintances. This keeps the subject from being sterile, but does not sentimentalize. Colman draws on many disciplines, including anthropology and archaeology. Her information comes from a variety of sources, some as old as the Roman historian Herodotus and others as current as her own interviews with morticians. Images include photographs of burial sites and reproductions of paintings and engravings dealing with death. All of the images are in black and white. In most non-fiction texts I would consider this a detractor, but here I think the monochrome images suit the book’s somber subject matter.

The text provides both finding aids and additional material. A table of contents, chronology of burial customs, glossary, bibliography, and index are provided. Colman also includes a gazetteer of burial sites of famous people, a collection of interesting epitaphs, and an explanation of the symbolism of images commonly carved on gravestones.

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts illuminates the burial process and illustrates how it is a common part of every person’s life. It is an interesting, warm, and respectful examination of customs across time. It may not appeal to a broad audience of middle grade readers, but it will interest and entertain some and comfort others.