Friday, September 26, 2014

Community Tool Box

The University of Kansas' Work Group for Community Health and Development has tons of information and resources for community coalitions and organizations.

ABOUT THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX

The Community Tool Box is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. It offers thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities.
Want to learn about community assessment, planning, intervention, evaluation, advocacy, and other aspects of community practice? Then help yourself to over 300 educational modules and other free tools.
Under continuous development since 1994, the Community Tool Box is widely used in teaching, training, and technical support. Currently available in English, Spanish, and Arabic and with millions of user sessions annually, it has reached those working in over 230 countries around the world.

WHY THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX?

The vision behind the Community Tool Box is that people — locally and globally — are better prepared to work together to change conditions that affect their lives. Our mission is to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas, and resources.
With the belief that people can change their communities for the better, partners at the University of Kansas and collaborating organizations developed the Community Tool Box as a public service.
Our fervent hope is that these tools can make it easier for people to take action to assure healthier and more just communities throughout the world.
Table of Contents includes:
Community Assessment, Developing a Strategic Plan, Leadership and Management, Implementing Services, Advocacy, and Evaluation

-Community Tool Box

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Ideas from Awesome School Librarians

Colleen Graves teaches coding, Scratch, Mozilla Popcorn Maker, Skype with game developers, MaKey MaKey at middle school. Also uses Videolicious, iMovie, Wix. Has a Wall of Shelfies (selfie with favorite book). "Make Monday Workshops"

Andy Plemmons: PreK use Storybird app, K use Chromville, use Google Earth to preview walking field trips, Flipgrid video discussion tool, about Mr. Plemmons:
"turned the media center froma place where kids consume content into a place where they can create content"
Michelle Colte: Hour of Code, Code.org, Poem in Your Pocket Day, Global Read Aloud, says:
"Coding is a language... one of the literacies. As an educator, my job is to promote digital literacy, informational literacy, and, of course, reading literacy."
-School Librarian of the Year awards, SLJ September 14. info

User Experience: The Benefits of Less

Websites:
Less content can be done better than too much content and poor design.

"Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a daring pilot and talented author, also weighed in on user experience:

'In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.'

In some ways, libraries have been taking the opposite approach. We've gotten in the habit of tacking on new services and taking on new responsibilities, and many library websites can be seen as piecemeal collections of patron engagement tactics."

"More content thins out our efforts. It sounds simple, but the more things a library tries to do, the less attention it can devote to any one thing. Without the attention they deserve, web content and services can’t be as effective as they should be."

"Good content takes staff time to produce and arrange, and the navigational overhead can be a time expenditure for users." Less is more - less content will be easier to manage.

LJ January 2011

Neil Gaiman says...

I think it is really important to show dark things to kids. And in the showing, to also show that dark things can be beaten--that you have power.
-Neil Gaiman in SLJ September 2014
(pretend I could find a link to the Up Close column and interview)