AASL announces 2015 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning

CHICAGO – The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced its 2015 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in San Francisco. The annual list honors 25 Internet sites that provide enhanced learning and curriculum development for school librarians and their teacher collaborators. Now in its seventh year, with 175 recognized sites, the list is considered the "best of the best" by AASL.

Sites named as Best Websites for Teaching & Learning foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation and collaboration. They offer tools and resources in the categories of media sharing, digital storytelling, managing and organizing, social networking and communications, curriculum collaboration and content resources.

The websites honored in 2015 include:

• Media sharing:
  TouchCast, Tackk, Pear Deck, Apps Bar, Soundtrap
   
• Digital storytelling:
  Storyboard That, My Storybook, Booktrack Classroom
   
• Manage and organize:
  Beyond Pad, Google Classroom,  FlipQuiz
   
• Social networking and communications:
  Bookopolis, Answerables, DIY, Beenpod, IFTTT
   
• Curriculum collaboration:
  Gooru, Molecular Workbench, Knowmia, Hstry,  Engineering is Elementary
   
• Content resources:
  What Was There, Code, BioDigital Human, PhET

Links, descriptions and tips for the 2015 Best Websites and previously recognized sites can be found at www.ala.org/aasl/bestlist.

“This year the Best Websites committee reviewed over eighty amazing websites,” said Heather Moorefield-Lang, chair. “This committee is dedicated to finding engaging, educational and interesting sites that can be used by students, librarians and their peer educators in libraries and classrooms. As always we hope everyone enjoys this year's list, and that members of AASL, as well as ALA as a whole, along with fellow educators and administrators will continue to submit nominations via our webpage for future review.”

“New websites tend to pop up every day and it would be virtually impossible to track which ones are the most useful,” said Terri Grief, AASL president. “Luckily for us, a hardworking and knowledgeable committee has done the work for us and named 25 websites as the Best Websites for Teaching & Learning for 2015.”

The Best Websites for Teaching & Learning provide a foundation to support AASL's learning standards and each website is linked to one or more of the four strands of the “Standards for the 21st-Century Learner” – skills, dispositions in action, responsibilities and self-assessment strategies. Best Websites are free, Web-based sites that are user-friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover.

The Best Websites for Teaching & Learning list is based on feedback and nominations from AASL members. School librarians can nominate their most used websites at www.ala.org/aasl/bestlist.  Nominations to be considered for recognition at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference must be submitted by March 1, 2016.

The American Association of School Librarians, www.aasl.org, a division of the American Library Association (ALA), empowers leaders to transform teaching and learning.