Did you try last summer’s free YA downloads of great pairs of teen audiobooks from Sync? Well, you won’t want to miss this year’s great list of titles. Starting today you can download the 2011 Georgia Peach Book Award winner, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, and the William Shakespeare classic, Romeo & Juliet. In case you’re not familiar with Shiver, here’s a review of the audiobook from AudioFile:

As if high school weren’t already hard enough without adding werewolves to the mix! This earnest teen romance is presented alternately from Grace’s point of view and from Sam’s, so Jenna Lamia and David Ledoux trade off narrating duties. It’s an effective technique for the audio format. At one point in the story, Grace describes Sam and “the soft, sad shape of his lips, looking just like his voice sounded,” which is also a pretty good description for how Ledoux sounds. His funny, appealing, sometimes-wobbly voice is especially appropriate for a conflicted teenaged guy who also happens to be a werewolf. Occasionally overwrought or treacly, SHIVER is sure to appeal to fans of TWILIGHT and other paranormal teen fare. J.M.D. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2009]

Shiver and Romeo & Juliet are available for download June 23-June 29. Then June 30-July 6 you can download Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, a past Peach Award nominee, and The Trial by Franz Kafka, a related title. Here’s the AudioFile review of Little Brother:

In Cory Doctorow’s latest YA thriller, Marcus, a 17-year-old hacker, finds himself imprisoned by the Department of Homeland Security after a massive terrorist attack in San Francisco. In a sign of the times, the U.S. is becoming an Orwellian police state, and Marcus is the only one who can set things right. Kirby Heyborne is the perfect choice to narrate. His youthful voice offers a sly intelligence beyond its years while still managing to sound innocent enough to garner plenty of sympathy. Heyborne becomes Marcus in every possible respect, never reading, but simply living the role. Listeners will find themselves immersed in a genuine portrayal that is as seamless and well realized as the story itself. L.B. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2008]

Just go to the Sync site to see all the other titles available this summer, including DRMS favorite Revenge of the Witch (book one of the Last Apprentice series by Joseph Delaney, and Immortal by Gillian Shields. And those high-minded ones of you can get your classic fix with Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Remember: you only have one week to download each pair of titles, but then you have them forever! What a deal!

I’ve been working with Mrs. Evans’ marvelous green class for the past three weeks on my Teach 21/Media 21 Capstone as we learned about information literacy and deterring cyberbullying. If you want to see what we’ve been doing, here’s a link to our video page: http://askdrlibraryagainstcyberbullying.pbworks.com/w/page/39877388/Student-Videos. Browse around while you’re there and check out all our other information literacy and cyberbullying messages, including what you need to know about copyright and fair use, plagiarism, evaluating sources of information, social bookmarking, and using NoodleTools to cite your sources.

Today Dean Rusk celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with visits from local officials and former students and faculty, a celebration dinner, and a look back through the years with a slide show, videos, and old yearbooks on hand. Did you know that Mr. Mann, Mr. Martin, Ms. Swanson, and Ms. White are all former students from DRMS? Can you name any other well-known DRMS alumni?

Dean Rusk Middle School is named for former United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a former Cherokee County resident. Secretary Rusk was born in Cherokee County in 1909 and later served as Secretary of State for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His dad was a minister and a farmer, and his mom was a teacher. Mr. Rusk graduated with honors from Davidson College and became a Rhodes scholar. He played a significant role as advisor to both Presidents during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. Secretary of State Rusk also contributed significantly to the establishment of our fabulous school, and we are proud to honor him today.

So here are next year’s Georgia Peach Book Award Nominees. You may have noticed that we already own several: Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher, Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, and Shift by Jennifer Bradbury. Oh, and in case you were wondering about the winner of the 2011-2011 Georgia Peach Book Award: it’s Dean Rusk favorite Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. Honor books were If I Stay by Gayle Forman and The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan.

Need more info about next year’s Georgia Children’s Book Award Nominees? Then check out this slide show. You’ll want to read them all! Feel free to borrow this slide show and post to your own blog or website.

Quick! Where can you get a free website that you can easily create yourself with no HTMl or CSS experience that has no ads (and promises it never will)? And, oh, yeah, the site also includes free hosting, over 70 great designs, powerful blogging features, and the ability to publish to your own domain name if you already have one (or Weebly’s subdomain if you don’t). The answer: Weebly!

And did I mention that you can also add pictures, videos, music and audio, documents, maps, and photo galleries? Sell products, accept online bookings, create a contact form, or arrange your pages in multiple columns? Drag on slideshows, files, forums, games, RSS feeds, or any other HTML embed code — all by simply dragging and dropping. Everything.

I don’t know how they do it. I didn’t say I know everything. I just said they do it. And they do it so well they’ve earned impressive s from writers in Time, Newsweek, The BBC, TechCrunch, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and GigaOm. Weebly is backed by some of the most
knowledgeable angel investors in Silicon Valley, including Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures, Ron Conway (original investor in Google), Mike Maples (Floodgate), Aydin Senkut (Felicis VC), Rajeev Motwani and Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail).

What’s not to love? There’s even a demo video to explain it all.  Edudemic also named them as one of the top 35 classroom tools. So what are you waiting for, people? Get out there and claim your free Weebly website before these people come to their senses!

So there are plenty of URL shortening websites out there, but not much new, right? Wrong! Fur.ly allows you to shorten multiple URLs in one fell swoop. I can see tons of uses for this in educational settings. All you do is open fur.ly, enter your first URL,  and then a second entry box opens, so you enter another URL, and so on and so on, until you’re finished. Then you click on Go, and Voila! you have a cute, furry little URL, you click on Try it, and then you just click through all of your websites, quick as a flash. You could use this URL to share favorite sites with friends, to create a pathfinder for students, or to share all your websites with colleagues. Students, you could share all your favorite sites with your friends via one single tiny address. Fur.ly is fast, easy, and fun! You can enter up to fifty URLs in one sitting. Only  problem is, if one fails, they all go down the drain. So be careful; be sure to copy and paste from current, active URLs.

Pixton makes it easy for students to learn how to create cartoons in a variety of sizes with easy-to-follow online videos.  When finished, students can post to Facebook, email their cartoons, or embed them in a blog or other online site, even WordPress, with a little help from VodPod.

Pixton is available “for fun, for free,” or additional features are available for educational  or business use at reasonable prices. Pixton’s creators have a very ethical code of conduct and they encourage users to report abuse of this code, so parents can feel confident allowing their students to use the site, unlike other graphic design sites that often feature content inappropriate for minors. Safety tips for students and parents are even included on the site.

With seven comic formats, all of which have individual sizes and shapes, plus a variety of characters and backgrounds, Pixton can keep students immersed in the learning process without requiring extensive training and artistic skills.

Cartoonster is an ultra cool site that features free tutorials  for all you future cartoon artists out there. Cartoonster’s tutorials show you how to get started, choose (and use) the right tools, create your first animation, animate simple shapes in 3D, and even how to make those 3D shapes jump. So you won’t get bored while you’re learning, you can change the background color, participate in an owl-naming contest, or click on entertaining quick videos between tutorials. This site  has been around for a long time, but I figure, like they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” right? Try using ideas you learn from Cartoonster to create a presentation to share what you have learned on a recent research topic, and impress your classmates and teacher with your awesome skills.