With the September issue, School Library Media Activities Monthly will have a new name: School Library Monthly. 

With the name change comes a pair of new URLs, coming on August 5:

• The new magazine Web site will be http://www.schoollibrarymonthly.com.
• The blog will move to http://blog.schoollibrarymonthly.com (we’ll remind you).

The name change reflects how the magazine has grown over time; “activities” in the title no longer felt indicative of our profession’s commitment to serious learning.

Have thoughts about the change? Leave a comment here.

For the October issue of School Library Media Activities Monthly, we need a few more ideas for how to tweak those traditionally bad country reports and help nudge the project closer toward inquiry.  Here’s the scenario.

A teacher comes into the media center ready to schedule his class’s visits to do “the country report.” The teacher has brought a copy of his graphic organizer, which asks students to find and record the country’s capital, the population, languages spoken, major exports, currency, major tourist attractions, etc.  There is a place where students will draw the nation’s flag.  At home, students will create a poster that contains the information that they found.  Color printouts may be added to embellish the poster.  It will hang in the hallway outside the teacher’s classroom during parent-teacher conferences.

The teacher is proud of this lesson and loves hanging the posters outside his classroom. The parents love seeing their children’s work when they come for conferences.

You are concerned that this project will do little to build students’ skills beyond finding and copying information. 

To preserve his pride but move students toward questioning, deeper thinking, and synthesis, what “nudges toward inquiry” can you suggest?

If you can help, click here to submit your ideas. Thanks!Image from Wikimedia; edited with Big Huge Labs’ Captioner 

If you were at ALA, will you take a look at the ARCs that you picked up there? (This will be easy to do if you stub your toe on the big Leaning Tower of Pisa bedside pile and they all fall over. Not that it’s happened to me or anything.)

Now do a quick count: how many have a non-Caucasian author, illustrator, or protagonist?

Did you discover what my friend Laura and I did? That there didn’t seem to be many non-Caucasian ARCs?

As the publishing world continues to struggle financially, is this a taste of things to come? That’s a scary thought as my own school continues to become more diverse.

By the way, the above is the only one I have from exhibits.  It’s from the ABC-CLIO booth.  I took it to show my co-author that our book, Story Starters and Science Notebooking, only had one copy left (that’s it on the bottom shelf, green with a red stripe at the bottom).  Notice how many of the book covers feature non-Caucasian faces.