CCSA and CSW Library Blog

TeachingBooks online resources available Have you heard your student talking about a book or an author that you’ve never heard of? Would you like to know more about what he or she is reading? Every Red Clay student, parent, teacher and librarian now for the first time has free online access to see and hear the best creators of books for children and teens — thanks to the district providing TeachingBooks.net for the entire school community. To freely access TeachingBooks, simply: 

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    •  Go to http://TeachingBooks.net/home/ 
    •  Enter your password: RCTbooks

TeachingBooks is a great way to provide everyone equal access to educational and literacy resources. Through TeachingBooks, all children can see and hear the best authors and illustrators in their studios. These glimpses into who the authors are and how they work are exciting and valuable experiences that can be enjoyed at school and home. TeachingBooks.net, a Wisconsin-based resource, is an entirely new kind of service designed to generate enthusiasm for books and reading by providing thousands author programs and K–12 book resources that reveal the spirit and personality within books. Among the growing collection of more than 12,000 resources available are original movies of beloved authors like Newbery Medalist Christopher Paul Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy) and Caldecott Medalist David Wiesner (Tuesday and The Three Pigs). For more information, contact librarian Mrs. Tise (651-2700 or mary.tise@redclay.k12.de.us)

We have some wonderful teachers at Cab, and one of them has been named the Red Clay District’s teaching with technology star!  Congratulations to Ed Killheffer!  Check out his website at http://teachers.redclay.k12.de.us/ed.killheffer/ to see what his math and economics classes have been doing.

Why did I mention Mr. Killheffer in a post on NetTrekker?  Well, one of his rewards was a free subscription for the entire school to NetTrekker.  NetTrekker is an academic search engine that’s safe, fast and easy to use for teachers, librarians, students and parents.  Look up almost any topic and find websites, images, lesson plans and tutorials.  Everything is organized by reading level, format and subject area, so it can be a valuable homework resource, as a starting point for research papers.

You must register as a user, but the instructions are easy.  Find them here.  You will need to select our state (Delaware!) and enter our school name (Cab).  After that, you can start using NetTrekker!  We’ll watch the usage statistics and use them to decide whether or not to subscribe again next year.

Now there’s a new reason to go to the library catalog.  We just purchased 13 reference books in electronic form, ranging from Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia to Novels for Students, to the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice and more.  Because they’re in electronic form, you can read the articles (and see all the pictures and illustrations) online.  It’s like bringing a shelf of reference books along with you wherever you take your computer.  Now, how cool is that?

 There’s also a link from the library website (which you can view at: http://teachers.redclay.k12.de.us/mary.tise/)  Click on the link to “Virtual Reference Library” and enter the easy password (available from Mrs. Tise in the library) and you’re on your way researching.

The complete list of titles available as eBooks includes:

Seems like nearly everyone in school is working on a research paper or project right now.  Oh sure, the library has lots of books and resources, but sometimes what you need just isn’t on the shelf.  The solution?  Most libraries, including ours, turn to a neighbor and borrow what they don’t have.  Even great libraries like University of Delaware and Harvard have to borrow from their neighbors every once in a while.  There are so many books being published that no one library can afford to buy them all, so we all share through a program known in the library world as Interlibrary Loan, or ILL.

 Here’s how ILL works:  Sammy Scholar comes to the Cab/Charter Library with a list of books he’d like to use in his research.  One or two of the books aren’t on our shelves, but they are sitting in the library at, say, the University of Delaware.  Sammy gives Mrs. Tise a list of the books he wants (ideally, he’ll print the information from the other library’s  online catalog).  Mrs. Tise emails the ILL department at the other library, and helpful library workers there go to the shelves and mail the desired book to Mrs. Tise.  The book is officially on loan from one library to another (interlibrary loan!), and Mrs. Tise lets Sammy Scholar use it until it’s time to return the book to the library that owns it.

Of course, Sammy Scholar doesn’t wait until the last minute to ask Mrs. Tise for these books.  Interlibrary loan is a wonderful thing, but it does take time (perhaps a week or two) to request and move books from one library to another.  Sammy Scholar knew this, and he got started on collecting his resources right away.  Way to go, Sammy!

Have you ever been writing an essay and needed a synonym for a certain word?  Or, have you ever found yourself reading something online and come to a concept (say,  stoichiometry or hetrodoxy) that you need to read more about?  Try using the “Clever Keys” now on the library’s computers.

Clever Keys (www.cleverkeys.com) is free software that provides instant access to definitions at dictionary.com, synonyms at thesaurus.com, facts at reference.com, and more.  Click on the system tray icon (lower right corner of the screen) that looks like an open book.    (It’s right there in the middle of the list in this image.)   You’ll find the keyboard shortcuts to make Clever Keys work for you.  Clever keys.  Clever library!

One of the cool new features of the library’s catalog is that you can find good (meaning reliable, authoritatative, the kind your teacher wants you to use for your research!) websites listed.

Let’s say you need information about some topic–the Renaissance or the Great Depression, for example–and you make the mistake of starting with a Google search. You type in your search term and find five gazillion hits. How do you know which ones have good information, and which websites were written by a fourth graders for a class project? (There are ways to figure out what’s good and what isn’t, but that’s another story for another day.)

IF you had started with the catalog, you would find a nice list of websites. Each item on the list has a little description of the things you’ll find in that site, and each item tells you what grade level it targets. That way, you can start with the information that’s just the right reading level for you. The library catalog. Check it out at: http://167.21.9.121/webopac/main?siteid=cab