https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/23/us/rats-drive-tiny-cars-trnd/index.html
Fieldwork Fail: When Science Goes Messy by Jim Jourdane
You can buy this book for 75% off. See details below.
This is the end – I’m stopping selling Fieldwork Fail !
The book « Fieldwork Fail » was a huge success. Hundreds of people from more than 50 country – you – made this beautiful project happen. Word to mouth is excellent and many people from dozens of countries told me they love the book.
Still I have an issue right now 
I need to close my shop, where I was selling the book. With my books still in it.
After the crowdfunding, I wanted the book available later on for more people.
To distribute them, finding a publisher could have been a choice. But talking with them made me remember why I had avoided them in the first place…
Another possibility could have been to sell directly on Amazon. As a customer, Amazon makes things easy, reliable and fast.
But there were some points I had issues with: Amazon is in monopoly situation and strangle independant book stores, the company doesn’t even pay its taxes, the working conditions of employees are poor, and as a seller Amazon is complex and bureaucratic.
So, that wasn’t my favorite model either. Was any alternative possible? Amazon seems to be difficult to avoid when you talk about selling books, but I decided to run an alternative anyway, « for a couple of months ».
I opened a website, makisapa.com, and connected the store to an independant fulfillment company. I shipped a palet of books in USA and in UK so that people there could get the book faster in these countries, but with also the possibility to ship the book anywhere in the world. So when you ordered a book in my store, a guy in USA or UK was shipping the book directly to your address, and I could focus on other projects instead of having to ship myself books every two days.
This alternative that was just an experiment worked actually for one year and a half! Hundreds of people bought the book in this shop.
Ok, it worked with the exception that for many other people, there is nothing outside Amazon. Your book doesn’t seem to even have an existence if it’s not listed in their platform.
So, after this experience, is it possible to make a book ignoring Amazon?
It is but it’s difficult. This independant distribution worked well for selling the book “word of mouth” but killed the idea of promoting it outside this word-of-mouth area.
Still, this independant distribution was effective, and allowed to hundreds of people to order the book !
…Just enough to make me do a second print.
A few months later, the sales of the store were just covering the storage fees.
I could live with the status quo, but the fulfillment company contacted me two weeks ago.
What is worse than having a huge pile of books on your hands ?
Having a big pile of books on your hands… thousands of miles away, without any places to store them. And with a countdown!
Sure, there are others fulfillment companies, but in the long term, I’m not sure that the sales will cover the storage and others fees anyway.
I contacted again publishers.
Printing wasn’t that expensive but it was great quality, printed in Belgium – the specialists of comic books in Europe. As the Kickstarter was successful, I made sure to have the best printing quality I could get. And I don’t regret it, they made an awesome work!
The only conclusion right now: I have the urgent need to reduce this huge supply of quality-printed books to make everything easier to handle!
To do so, I will sell the english version of Fieldwork Fail, during the next 10 days, with a 75% discount, on my store.
Thereafter, I will close my shop, end international shipping, and will just keep some copies (at the regular price) in Amazon.com (not many alternatives – I want to keep the book available and show that it does exist! If you have an Amazon account, of course don’t hesitate to leave a comment about the book.
So, if you know colleagues, friends who could be interested, if you have a point of sale and want to sell the book, if you want to offer a copy to your school’s library or at the cafeteria of your university… The book is available for 10 days for just a quarter of the original price.
Shipping won’t be free but will be the same whatever the number of copies.
I want to finish with better news 🙂
I may have been a bit too optimistic or ambitious on the English version but all other versions of the book are doing great!
– The book in France is simpler to manage! Here too, I printed a lot of copies, but as they have been distributed in book stores with a proper release, unlike his English-speaking cousin, new readers are buying the book over time, month after month, thanks to a great media coverage and excellent word of mouth. It’s the opposite: I arrive soon at the end of the stock and need now to make a new print!
The book has even been selected for two French awards: La Science se Livre and Le Gout des Sciences. Ok, eventually I didn’t get these awards but it was already awesome to be selected – the book was even finalist in these two prizes!
– The book is now in german and portuguese! Published by Verlag Ludwig in Germany and Blutcher in Brazil. That makes an happy family of books!
Also, I have several ongoing projects that I will likely talk about in the next news.
Thank you for reading me this far!
Jim
Pixar Sparks Shorts
Pixar’s Animal Abuse Short ‘Kitbull’ Will Break Your Heart and Put It Back Together — Watch
https://www.indiewire.com/2019/02/pixar-kitbull-short-film-animal-abuse-watch-1202045405/
4 Mistakes I Made Trying to Raise a Middle School Reader by Kari Ness Riedel
As a self-proclaimed book lover, raising kids who love to read is a high priority. As soon as my son, Gabe, was born, snuggling up with a book at bedtime became an important ritual for us. He was an early reader, and throughout elementary school, he spent hours poring over books every week. When he entered middle school, however, his interest in reading for fun declined dramatically.
Here are a few mistakes I’ve made in my efforts to ensure he continues to read for pleasure as he gets older — and some adjustments that our family is making together to correct them.
Mistake #1: Not making time for reading.
Like many kids today, Gabe is busy. He plays competitive baseball, he’ll soon be a Kuk Sool Won black belt, and he has a considerable amount of homework every night. These passions and interests make him happy, but they’re time-consuming. It seems like there’s little time left for reading, especially since “read for 20 minutes” is no longer in his evening homework assignment as it was in elementary school.
My mistake was in accepting this busyness and not encouraging him to find the time to read. Recently, we did a family assessment of what we value and compared it with how we spend our time. Reading and learning about the world were at the top of our values list, so we looked more closely at Gabe’s schedule to see where he could find extra time to read. Those 15 minutes on Instagram, the 45 minutes watching baseball videos on YouTube, that half-hour waiting for his brother to finish practice — all were potential opportunities to read. We now help Gabe identify those windows of time and use them to work in additional reading.
Mistake #2: Pushing my literary interests instead of his.
Gabe and I shared a love of the Harry Potter series, so I assumed he would jump on my recommendation to read The Mysterious Benedict Society. Um, no. He became interested in that book only when his friend told him about it. For a while, I pushed classics and other books I wanted him to read, but was continually met with disinterest and even opposition in return. Wrong approach. What does work is making time for him to browse the shelves at our local bookstore and library and encouraging him to talk with friends about what they’re reading. Also, honoring his interests and what he wants to read — dystopian sci-fi and magazines like Sports Illustrated Kids, for example — has gotten better results than my pushing him toward books I think he should read. Seeing the power of peer recommendations even led me to create Bookopolis, a digital platform where kids can swap book recommendations with friends and explore peer reviews to find books they are excited to read.
Mistake #3: Not reading aloud to a child who knows how to read.
Before my son could read independently, read-aloud time with Mom was as important as tooth-brushing to our evening routine. We went through hundreds and hundreds of picture and chapter books. As Gabe learned to read, I initially rejoiced in my moments of freedom while he read alone. But when he stopped choosing reading as an activity to do on his own, I realized that, in addition to giving us precious family bonding time, reading together had actually increased his personal enthusiasm for books. Starting a book together was often the hook he needed to get sufficiently interested in the characters and the plot to then read the rest of the story on his own.
Mistake #4: Valuing tidiness over access to books.
I hate clutter. A couple of years ago, in an attempt to clean up, I moved every “kid book” in the house to one bookshelf in my children’s bedroom. The living room and the dining room were neater, but I found this actually reduced my kids’ reading. The “a-ha” moment came when I was running a used book drive for our school. We had several messy, overflowing boxes of books in our living room. My son would plop down on the couch, peer into the box, pull something out … and start reading!
We know that access to books is crucial for children’s development, and getting books to lower-income families who can’t afford them and to rural kids who live far from libraries should be a major public priority. But we can also make “access” to books a priority within our own homes — and this was a form of access I could influence. Needless to say, reading material is no longer limited to one room, but instead lives in every corner of our house so that my kids can find it and peruse it whenever (and wherever!) the mood strikes.
Yuniversity
Top 10 Educational Websites for Literacy of 2018
Homeschool Base is excited to announce the Top 10 Educational Websites for Multiple Subjects. The annual awards list recognizes exceptional and innovative websites and apps. All 10 websites were nominated and recommended by multiple independent home educators, teachers, and parents. Each resource receives Homeschool Base’s Purple Stamp of Approval, a personal endorsement from Homeschool Base and the homeschooling community. Websites cannot pay for a spot on this list.
We sincerely hope you enjoy browsing through the various categories and will discover new resources to use throughout the new year.
https://homeschoolbase.com/top-educational-websites-literacy-2018/
John Green launches Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information
ANUARY 17, 2019 BY JOYCE VALENZA L
On behalf of my library/educator colleagues, thank you, John Green.
Thank you, John, for offering us a new tool in introducing media literacy and credibility awareness with our learning communities. Thank you for lending your honest voice and passion to this mission.
John recently introduced a new 10-episode Crash Course series, Navigating Digital Information, developed in partnership with MediaWise–a project of the Poynter Institute, funded by Google, with curriculum developed by the Stanford History Education Group who gave us several important research projects, including the well-known study, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning, with its bleak wake-up call.
In the introduction, John discusses the importance of how the quality of the information we meet online shapes our understanding of the universe and our place in that universe.
as we allow ourselves to fall into the vast endlessness of passive scrolling, we allow the information we ingest, and the algorithms feeding us that information, to shape who we are as people–to shape how we think, what we value, whom we trust, and what we do. Much attention has rightly been paid to the ways that misinformation and disinformation are shaping our political and social discourse, but they are also shaping us–as individuals and as communities. Getting better at evaluating information means becoming a better citizen of the communities where you live; it also means become a better informed and more engaged person.
In the second episode, The Facts about Fact Checking: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information, John Green takes us to fact-checking school, sharing the importance of interrogating the information we discover online, encouraging us to work out our information analyzing muscles because,
better information leads to better decision-making, which leads to a better world.
He suggests three questions:
Screen Shot 2019-01-17 at 9.35.24 AMWho is behind the information?
Why are they sharing the information?
What types of claims are being made? Are those claims backed up by reliable evidence and what do others say about the claims?
Using a Thought Bubble example of a tweet advocating for steel straws, John demonstrates the need to have discussions with real data, to engage in cost-benefit analysis, and he shares the importance of understanding the fine line between being skepticism and cynicism. John also explores echo chambers and filter bubbles. Using a personal, real-life hypothetical sports example about a horrible football club, he shows how your inner skeptic might speak up mostly when you see information that seems like it must be wrong to you because it does not align with your pre-existing worldview.
Here’s the plan for the full 10-episode series:Screen Shot 2019-01-17 at 10.45.48 AM
Find more information about Crash Course:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashC…
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse
Tumblr: http://thecrashcourse.tumblr.com
Crash Course Kids: http://www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids
Support Crash Course on Patreon: http://patreon.com/crashcourse
DIY Book Trading Cards
DIY Book Trading Cards
JANUARY 9, 2019 BY KAREN JENSEN, TLT LEAVE A COMMENT
tradingcard
My family traveled over the holidays and at one point, we saw a TSA agent with a K9 dog. Thing 2 pointed and said, “look, there’s a dog,” which prompted the TS-9 to hand her a trading card made about the dog, whose name was Hilbert. It was a genius marketing strategy to make kids comfortable and satisfy their curiosity while maintaining their distance and prevent them from approaching or petting the working dogs.
tradingcards7 tradingcards8I kept thinking about this K9 trading card and all the fun marketing potential it has. So the other day I tweeted and said, what if we made book trading cards? I liked the idea so much that I then started obsessively figuring out ways to make trading cards and exploring the best tools, as I have a tendency to do. Here’s a look at 5 tools I used, the trading cards I created using them, and then at the end of this post I have a few ideas for ways that we can use the idea of trading cards to promote reading, programs and libraries in school and public libraries.
Instax Mini Trading Cards
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As regular readers know, I am recently obsessed with the Instax Mini camera. I like the wide variety of things you can do with it AND the fact that you get an instant picture. Patience is not a virtue I have and I don’t have a lot of art or tech skills. You can buy a variety of Instax Mini sticker frames, which have a piece that goes on the back of your photo, which helps make this project work. This back sticker makes it so that you can use both sides of the photograph to make quick and easy trading cards. Use a Sharpie marker (I found the Extra Fine tip worked the best) to write on the front and back of your instant photo. You can also use metallic silver Sharpies to write directly on the black back if you don’t have sticker frames. I wrote various facts and gave a rating for my book in the margins of the photo. Here I did an example using the upcoming book Dig by A. S. King.
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The benefit to this method is that it is seriously quick and easy. The drawback, of course, is that you have to have a couple of Instax Mini cameras on hand, which I recommend. (Did I mention I am a huge fan?) Film is not, however, cheap and I haven’t found it for less than around $0.68 a picture. So though it may be quick, easy and kind of low tech, it’s not in-expensive. The Instax Mini is a fun device, with immediate results and most tweens and teens I know are currently really interested in this device. This is a good starting place if you want easy and immediate results.
Sports Card Pro App
tradingcards2
The trading card that you see in the upper right hand card was made using the Sports Card Pro app, which I downloaded for free. It has in app purchases, but the initial app download is free. I made no additional purchases to create my trading card so the entire product was free to me.
Where you see the rocket ship in the left hand corner the Sports Card Pro app gives you a choice of various sports balls to put in that corner. This didn’t really work for me so I saved my picture and opened it in another app, Candy Camera, to add the rocket ship. But if you want a sports theme, you can do it all in this app and pretty quickly. I made the example you see in this picture in about 2 minutes while laying in bed with the TV on in the background and no real experience with the app. I tell you this because I want you to understand how quick and easy it was.
One of the things I liked about this app is how much focus it put on the picture, but that left less room for text. It has rigidly set text boxes and design elements, so it doesn’t allow for a lot of personalization or moving elements around. Some people would like this, but I found it frustrating as I wanted to move certain elements slightly in one direction or another and it just doesn’t give you that freedom of design. You could get around this problem by doing the most basic design in this app, saving your card and then uploading it into another app – like Over or PS Express – to add more design elements, but that’s a lot of additional steps and requires some additional knowledge.
Because this is a mobile device app, you have to be able to print wirelessly to some type of device. Because I knew I wanted a small, trading card size, I used the Print to Size app on my cell phone which allows you better control over sizing as opposed to simply printing from a mobile device to a wireless printer. I printed to both a regular printer and a Selphy photo printer, which I discuss more at the end of this post.
So while this is a good app for designing a sports themed card, it’s not necessarily good for other themes. It was quick and easy, but not very versatile.
Trading Card Creator at ReadThinkWrite
tradingcards5 tradingcards4
This is a free online program that has an educational focus, so it has a lot more room for text. You can include facts about the book, main characters, setting, etc. After you go through the generator – which is an easy to fill out step by step form – you download your card as a .pdf and it prints on a piece of letter size paper. Adobe is required to run the program.
When you print out your page it comes with instructions that tell you to cut it out, fold it, and tape it closed. It prints in color, but I accidentally printed mine in black and white. If you choose the “Make Your Own” option it allows you to put in your own category headings. Otherwise, the big section headings are pre-programmed, which can be a great feature for younger or newer users. However, it does not seem to allow you to move the various elements or text boxes around, so format wise there isn’t a lot of versatility here either. This is a quick and easy tool, but if you want more personalization or versatility, this isn’t the best tool for you. It’s a really great starting place and will work really well in most school or library settings.
Freehand Design Tools: Microsoft Publisher, Google Draw and Canva
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I used the format presented in the ReadWriteThink card and a sports trading card I had at home for inspiration to try my final option: Microsoft Publisher, Canva and Google Draw. Each of these programs are publishing programs that allow you the greatest amount of freedom and versatility in how you design and where you place your various trading card elements. You can see the results in the bottom left hand corner of the picture above. Both Canva and Google Draw are basically no or low cost programs that allow you to do freehand design. Microsoft Publisher requires the purchase of a yearly license and it is costly. All three design programs require a certain amount of skill, which most people get just by tinkering around in the programs. I am least well versed in Google Draw and abandoned that medium pretty quickly for something more familiar. I use Publisher and Canva pretty frequently so I was able to produce something I liked pretty quickly and without a lot of difficulty. The final product you see in the picture above was made using Publisher, which I am most comfortable with and, I feel, gives you the most freedom. The Teen and many of the teens I work with, however, are much more familiar with Google Draw and would probably prefer it.
After completing my card design I grouped all my design elements, right clicked on my trading card, saved it as a .jpeg and printed it to size. I was able to print 6 cards per one letter size sheet of card stock paper. Saving it as a .jpeg also allows you to upload it and share it on social media or easily transfer it from one device to another, like from my laptop to my cell phone. There are some real advantages to having a .jpeg file versus a .pdf file.
Printing My Trading Cards
All of the options allow you to save and print your trading card in one fashion or another. If you use a freehand graphics program you can save as a .jpg and print on card stock. You’ll want to use card stock to give it the heft of a trading card. If you have the option, I would print to photo paper to give it that glossy trading card look. Although I liked the look of the curved edges for the trading card design, it requires some additional cutting which was harder to make look nice with my questionable scissor skills. I liked the straight lines because I could use a paper cutter and get nice, straight edges. Your mileage may vary.
selphy4
If printing from a handheld device I would recommend using the Print to Size app and printing 2 trading cards side by side on one postcard using the Selphy printer and cutting them apart. This was the method of printing I used in the very first picture of this post. Printing with a Selphy printer or onto photo paper using a traditional printer gives you that glossy trading card resembling finish. If you’re not familiar with the Selphy photo printer, it’s a tool I highly recommend for anyone wanting to print photos from a mobile device. It’s small, portable and has its own built in wi-fi so you can take it with you on outreach events and print immediately from a smart phone or tablet. I reviewed the Selphy printer here if you would like more information.
Things to Include on a Book Trading Card
Title
Author
Setting
A catchphrase or brief descriptive phrase
Fun facts like characters, themes
If you like X, read this statements . . .
A star rating
What to Do with Book Trading Cards?
At it’s most basic, libraries could make book trading cards for our favorite or most recent YA titles and hand them out during book talks or at outreach events. Imagine book talking a book then handing each tween or teen a card with a picture of the book cover and a few basic facts about the book so they could remember to ask for it. Wouldn’t it be great to have teens come into the library after a day of booktalking and just hand staff a book trading card instead of trying to remember details about the book you booktalked that they want and hoping that staff can get enough details to get the right book into their hands?
This would also be a great marketing tool for the library itself or for specific programs. For example, during National Library Week multi-branch systems could make cards for each branch with basic facts about the branch and hand them out to visitors. Libraries could host some type of challenge inviting patrons to visit as many branches as possible during National Library Week and offering an entry into a prize for patrons who get one card from X number of branches.
Beyond using book trading cards as a promotional tool, we could also get tools into the hands of tweens and teens and encourage them to make their own. This activity combines reading/literacy with making, helping us achieve more of our goals. Have a program day where you provide a couple of Instax Mini cameras and some Sharpies and challenge teens to make their own trading cards. Or set up an ongoing station in the corner of your library and make a trading card wall to display teen created book trading cards. Teens could stop in during lunch, study hall or after school and make a quick book trading card and put it on your wall recommending books to their peers.
Learning how to use a good graphics program is a valuable skill for anyone, so don’t be afraid to have some in-depth sessions where you teach teens how to use Publisher, Canva or Google Draw and challenge them to design their own book trading cards. Many schools and libraries have tech training labs and this would be a fun project to teach design basics with some set parameters. I have found that many people want some concrete guidelines and examples to begin learning design with and here we would have a built in template to help guide us.
And don’t forget that if you want an easy to use template, you can have tweens and teens use the ReadWriteThink trading card creator. Print two of each card, one for participants to take home and one to display on an RA wall or book display. Or print 3 – so they can trade!
Some Final Thoughts and Perspectives
Depending on what you need, there are pros and cons to each of the various methods used above. Most school and public libraries are already set up to use something like the ReadWriteThink trading card creator and print. This is probably a really good starting point.
I highly recommend purchasing a smart phone/tablet and Selphy printer for any teen library space that wants to do a lot of photo based making and programming, but it does require some initial financial investment and the ongoing cost of the specific Selphy paper. You would need multiple devices to have a program, though you can connect multiple devices to one Selphy printer. Or you can set up a small maker station using one device and one printer and allow teens to create as they wanted. Not every teen area or school library has the space or the staff, but if you do a small maker station is a good idea.
And in my ideal world, I would write a grant to get 5 to 10 Instax Mini cameras for a teen space or program to do a wide variety of programming things there. You could also just have one and have teens share or set up a maker station using this method as well.
Don’t forget to create a hashtag so you can encourage tweens and teens to share their book trading cards online.
I made a wide variety of trading cards using all 5 methods over a two-day period. I spent all in all about 3 hours making trading cards. Again, I am a pretty proficient user of both Publisher and Canva so I didn’t have to learn the basics. Each method has its pros and cons and really all of them work pretty well. I liked the Sports Card Pro app the least, mainly because I was not making a sports themed trading card and it required some work around to get rid of the sports themes. As you can see, for my examples I used Thing 2’s Operation BB as a theme for my example cards, mainly because I had those photos readily available on my phone. We did, in fact, print out several of the cards we liked best – the one made in Publisher – and handed them out as a promotional tool and people thought they were very cool. I also uploaded it to the Operation BB social media page. These will, in fact, work really well as fun promotional tools. I had a lot of fun making the trading cards and highly recommend it.
So now it’s your turn. Make a trading card for your favorite book or book character and sharing it with us in the comments or on social media using the hasthag #BookTradingCard. I would love to see what everyone is creating (and reading!)
http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2019/01/diy-book-trading-cards/
Use for Information Writing
Poetry Gumball Machine!
Poetry Gumball Machine!
A bookstore in Brooklyn has just announced the loveliest new instalment: a poetry gumball machine where all the proceeds go to Planned Parenthood. The bookstore in question is Books Are Magic, a gorgeous independent bookstore in Cobble Hill owned by Modern Lovers author Emma Straub. Their poetry gumball machine is characteristically creative; the poems themselves have been water-colored by hand, and can be bought for a quarter. If you’re lucky, you might even get one of the special coupons that have been sprinkled throughout the vending machine as well!
Books Are Magic have long been inspiring visitors to their store with their cute hand-drawn blackboard, on which they write lists such as “Fierce Women in Fiction” and “Fave Siblings in Literature.” It’s clear that everyone who works at the bookstore has a passion for words so strong it’s infectious — and this poetry gumball machine is sure to generate a whole new community of poetry-lovers in Brooklyn.
On Instagram, Books Are Magic posted a picture of their first customer’s poem, which was the sweet and quirky ‘This Is Just To Say’ by William Carlos Williams. If you’re anywhere near Brooklyn, you’re going to want to run over to Books Are Magic right this minute and see what surprise poem you end up with — while donating to Planned Parenthood at the same time!
Unique independent bookstores like Books Are Magic keep the magic of literature well and truly alive, and creative ideas like this show why these bookstores remain so beloved. I hope that Books Are Magic keep updating us so we can see some of the other poems pulled from their colorful gumball machine!
Books are Magic – Brooklyn bookstore
Follow them on Instagram (and see more pictures): booksaremagicbk
Article source:
https://www.bustle.com/p/books-are-magic-bookstores-gumball-machine-takes-planned-parenthood-donations-gives-you-a-poem-72522
ELA in the middle 