WHS InfoTech Team May-June 2023 Newsletter |
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Hello and Happy End-of-the-Year! This newsletter contains information about access to summer resources and suggestions for things to listen to or read over the summer. Check it out! Please let us know how we can help, or just stop by to say hello. |
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Summer Resources Audiobooks, eBooks, Digital Magazines, and Comics |
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| | The Sora reading app gives K-12 students one-tap access to ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and more on any device, at any time, using their school credentials. | | |
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| | A must-have app for library users! Easily borrow physical items using your mobile device, receive reminders, manage receipts, and discover new digital content - all within the cloudLibrary app! | | |
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| | Comics Plus, powered by LibraryPass, is a digital platform offering thousands of digital comics, graphic novels and manga to readers through school, public, and academic libraries. | | |
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| | FollettShelf is a virtual bookshelf that provides a friendly online environment for students and teachers to search, read and manage their Follett eBook collection and other digital resources 24/7. Check out books online for FREE. | | |
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Summer Tech Resource AI Writing Check |
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made the art of detecting plagiarism more challenging than ever. There are tools available to determine whether a student has plagiarized or not, but none are foolproof. Richard Byrne, author of the blog Free Tech for Teachers, recommends AI Writing Check, which is a "free tool created by the collaborative efforts of the non-profits Quill.org and CommonLit. AI Writing Check is a tool that was created to help teachers try to recognize writing created through the use of artificial intelligence. To use AI Writing Check you simply have to copy a passage of text of 100 or more words and paste it into AI Writing Check. The tool will then tell you the likelihood that the writing has or has not been created by artificial intelligence. That's all there is to it. AI Writing Check isn't foolproof and as is pointed out on the site, students can still develop ways to get around tools designed to detect AI-generated writing. It's also worth noting that it can't handle more than 400 words at a time." To access AI Writing Check, click on the image above. To read the write-up by Richard Byrne on his blog, click on the button below. |
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Audiobook to Borrow The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline |
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"The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant novel about three women whose lives are bound together in nineteenth-century Australia and the hardships they weather together as they fight for redemption and freedom in a new society. Seduced by her employer’s son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to 'the land beyond the seas,' Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land. During the journey on a repurposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, a girl little older than her former pupils who was sentenced to seven years transport for stealing a silver spoon. Canny, where Evangeline is guileless, Hazel—a skilled midwife and herbalist—is soon offering home remedies to both prisoners and sailors in return for a variety of favors. Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives as an unpleasant nuisance. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. One of these relocated people is Mathinna, the orphaned daughter of the Chief of the Lowreenne tribe, who has been adopted by the new governor of Van Diemen’s Land. In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom. Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendships, and the unfettering of legacy." ~Goodreads Available on cloudLibrary. Log in with your Personal ID found in Infinite Campus. Click on the image above to access the audiobook from cloudLibrary. Click on the button below to read a book review. |
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Ebook to Borrow Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson |
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"NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning author of Life After Life transports us to a restless London in the wake of the Great War—a city bursting with money, glamour, and corruption—in this spellbinding tale of seduction and betrayal. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: WASHINGTON POST, TIME, THE GUARDIAN, BOOKLIST 'Set during Jazz Age London, in all its fizzy madness and desperation... As dark as Atkinson's stories can get, within them always shines a beacon of humanity.' —Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of Dark Places 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost. With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson gives us a window in a vanished world. Slyly funny, brilliantly observant, and ingeniously plotted, Shrines of Gaiety showcases the myriad talents that have made Atkinson one of the most lauded writers of our time." ~Amazon Available on cloudLibrary. Log in with your Personal ID found in Infinite Campus. Click on the image above to access the ebook. Click on the button below to read a book review. |
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eMagazine to Borrow Smithsonian |
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"Smithsonian is a science and nature magazine and the official journal published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; although editorially independent from its parent organization. The first issue was published in 1970." Sora now has digital magazines! Log in to the site by selecting Windham/Raymond School District RSU 14. There you will find a selection of magazines to borrow, ranging from children's to adult levels. All titles are available all of the time. No waiting! Click on the image above to access Smithsonian magazine. Click on the button below to access the Sora database of magazines, ebooks, and audiobooks. Select Windham/Raymond School District and log in with Google. |
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"The gripping true story of a South Korean woman's student days under an authoritarian regime in the early 1980s, and how she defied state censorship through the rebellion of reading." ~Goodreads "Comics Plus is a digital platform offering thousands of digital comics, graphic novels, and manga to readers, exclusively through school, public, and academic libraries. It is powered by LibraryPass." ~ComicsPlus Check it out! Click on the image above to access the library website. To get to Comics Plus, hover over "Digital Books and Magazines" and click on "Comics Plus." Sign up to create an account. |
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Our next Book Club is on Tuesday, June 6th, 2023 at 2:10 in the library. The pair of books we're discussing is Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr and The Library Book by Susan Orlean. We hope to see some new faces and looking forward to seeing familiar ones, too! Join us! |
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| | Click on the image above to order from Print: A Bookstore! "On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?
Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.
In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago." ~Goodreads | | |
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| | Click on the image above to order from Print: A Bookstore! "When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.
How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.
Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.
Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?
Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.
Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.” ~Goodreads | | |
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