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The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Recent winner of the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen fiction for 2014, Cathy Marie Buchanan transported me to another place and time with this story of sisters surviving all the odds against them in 1880s Paris. I love it when a book prompts…
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The Silent Summer of Kyle McGinley by Jan Andrews
The Silent Summer of Kyle McGinley by Jan Andrews My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is my first read of the 2014-15 Ontario Library Association’s White Pine picks for this year and based on this book alone, I’m very hopeful. Like last year’s Old Man by David A. Poulsen, our main character Kyle McGinley…
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Reading in a Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley
Jenkins and Kelley offer an optimistic alternative to Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains which is filled, as Jenkins claims, with “contemporary anxieties” (p. 10). The book offers instead this explanation: “As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these [media] changes. But one thing is…
book reviews, books, Code Switch, collection development, Collective intelligence, definition of literacy, educational research, Henry Jenkins, library leadership, literacy, literacy promotion, Negotiating Cultural Spaces, Nicholas Carr, Participatory Culture, professional development, reading, Reading in a Participatory Culture, research, school librarian, school library, secondary school library, secondary school teacher, struggling reader, student-centred learning, teacher-librarian, transliteracy, Wyn Kelley -
Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
I don’t think of myself as a gamer. I have been known to play lots of those Flash-based Facebook games with my Candy Crush Saga friends, and occasionally a great puzzle-based novella will come along like Gabriel Knight 2, Syberia or Ripper that I devour, but generally I didn’t think they were a big part…
Black & White, book reviews, Candy Crush Saga, collection development, definition of literacy, digital identity, Eagles Flight, educational research, educational technology, Epic Winners, Gabriel Knight 2, Game of Thrones Ascent, game-based learning, games for change, information literacy, inquiry-based learning, Jane McGonigal, Lemonade Stand, library leadership, Librarygame, literacy promotion, McGonigal, meaningful games, non-fiction, Plants vs. Zombies, professional development, Quest to Learn, Reality is Broken, Ripper, school librarian, secondary school library, secondary school teacher, serious games, Sim City, Spore, student-centred learning, Syberia, teacher-librarian, technology, technology integration, The Audience, the game, The Sims, transliteracy, Twitter, Will Wright