Heads Up: especially MS/HS English Teachers

First of all, happy World Read-Aloud Day!

This is the week of Red Dot Book Awards voting.  This is an annual event of Singapore international schools -- and the multiple copies bought for this reading initiative become valuable extended reading & literature circle resources.

Please encourage your class to participate - or invite me to speak to your class for a 5-minute get-out-the-vote pitch.  The books have been up in the library for the past several months and I know a lot of your students have read at least two - which is all that is required to choose ONE per category.

Last votes must be in by a week from Friday.  Winners to be announced on Saturday, March 16th.

See this post on Red Dot Voting on the general Kishore Mahbubani Library blog - which has short 1-minute videos of the book covers flipping like pages - a quick reminder to students of the books up for the awards this year.

There's a QR code for mobile devices to read - making it easy to vote.  I will have my 12 library iPads up on the front desk ready for anyone to use.

NB: Our school code for voting is simply UWCEAST (the voting form asks for a code - so we can tell which school students are voting from).

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Trial Databases from Gale Cengage

As you know from the Friday, Feb. 8th Research Skills Professional Learning Day, we are working hard to get our digital resources easy to find and easy to use.  The place to always start (excuse the split infinitive) for all our UWCSEA links & logins -- as well as the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore eResources is:

research.uwcsea.edu.sg

For you English teachers, there are two trial subscriptions we have access to until March 15th -- and Susanne Clower, the Dover librarian, and I are anxious to know what you think of them.

You can access them via our Gale Cengage homepage -- on the right hand side.

Literature Criticism Online (read about it here) is a resource we buy once and own forever.  Like very expensive reference books.  Right now, I'm not sure we have the budget for it.

Literature Resource Center (read about it here) is an annual subscription.  It is also not cheap.  So if we buy it, we need to make sure it gets used.  Frankly, I think this is probably the better bet right now.  But if you don't think so, then I don't want to waste our money.

Please have a look at both of them.  Or feel free to tell me what kinds of research your students are likely to do and I will do some test searches myself.