Digital Libraries for Schools — ICDL

The International Children’s Digital Library is a wonderful collection of over 2600+ digital books (ebooks) in almost 50 languages including Arabic, French, Spanish, English, Farsi and Mongolian.  The mission of the ICDL “is to support the world’s children in becoming effective members of the global community – who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas — by making the best in children’s literature available online free of charge.”

Through an advanced search, the continuously growin collection may be located by various attributes such as language, audience, subject, genre or appearance (e.g. “cover colors”). Some of the books, such as “Black Ear… Blonde Ear” are bilingual

Arabic/English Bilingual

An interesting and very useful feature is the ability to switch the language of the interface so that the library may be searched in a user’s primary language. Books are easily browsable for reading and it is possible to print pages as well. Students really like to use this resource and their feedback and ideas are solicited and welcomed 🙂 Teachers like it too because new and different foreign language materials are often hard to locate. In addition, there is a helpful “Teachers’ Manual.”

Exploring Echolocation and Bats

Today was super! One of my favorite first grade teachers, who is always interested in trying something new, was bringing her class to the library to read magazines (no one reads them unless invited, and then they LOVE them!). She’d read Stellaluna to her students in the process of exploring mammals and animal life cycles.

This was the opportunity I’d been waiting for to use the Echo the Bat ebook. This wonderful resource is a story about a bat pup called Echo, who learns about echolocation from his mother. An important story element is when Echo gets lost in a storm. Viewers have to accept a “mission” to help Echo find her family and friends. Along the way, we learn how satellites function. This sub site is a part of the larger Imagers site (Interactive Multimedia Adventures for Grade School Education using Remote Sensing) by the good folks at NASA.