by Heather Moorefield-Lang and Ida Mae Craddock, October 2021

Each year we feature a selection of digital resources to review for your learning community. We look to find new online tools and technology that might be useful to your students and peer educators. With the pandemic, some the following resources can also be useful in delivering instruction or aiding in student learning. There are so many great resources available to us as librarians and educators, we hope you like this selection we enjoyed exploring.

Citizen DJ: https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/

Do you enjoy mixing music and audio? How about your students and learning community? If so, you need to check out Citizen DJ, a site brought to us from the Library of Congress. They provide users with free-to-use audio and sound bites to make music. Explore sounds, download, and then use the built-in remix studio to make super fun music for videos, public service announcements, podcasts, the next great student pop release, and so much more.

Bites Media: https://bitesmedia.com/

Our lives are filled with news and media. Information is coming at our learning community nonstop. Geared toward students and educators, Bites Media helps you connect current events to curricula with topics including science, technology, law, politics, sports, health, and so much more. Educators can curate articles based on a common theme, and students can choose an article to read and then complete a quiz created by Bites Media. Quizzes could be used for group and class discussions as well. This is a great site for teaching media literacy and news bias.

Diverse BookFinder: https://diversebookfinder.org/

School librarians are continuously on the lookout for diverse books to add to their collections. We want our students to see themselves in the books that they read, and we want students to encounter lives that are different from their own. Diverse BookFinder is an online resource that can be of great use to school librarians working with young people. A recent winner of the American Association of School Librarians Best Digital Tools recognition, Diverse BookFinder presents a comprehensive collection of children's picture books that feature Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). This site not only has an amazing searchable database for books, but also shares data on representation of BIPOC characters in children's books, including highlights and trends in this field. This is a useful resource for those studying to be school librarians and their future colleagues working in the field.

Copyright and Creativity for Ethical Digital Citizens: https://www.copyrightandcreativity.org/

School librarians have long been the leaders in their learning communities in the areas of copyright and fair use. Copyright and Creativity for Ethical Digital Citizens is a resource that provides materials for peer educators and students about copyright, its protections, its limitations, and how copyright can encourage and engage learning communities in creativity. This site offers resources for all grade levels as well as professional development materials for educators. It focuses on copyright and ethical use in the United States and has a wealth of information on these very important topics.

Untold: https://untoldhistory.org/

There are many stories throughout history that often don't get told in the classroom that our students need to know. Untold is a collection of free, short videos that focus on this lesser-known history. Videos are animated and designed to engage a young audience. These videos also encourage our students and learning community to question the history that they do learn in the classroom. This is an excellent resource for history classes as well as for bias, media, and primary source lessons with school librarians.

We hope you have found a new site or two to try out with your learning community in our column. We always enjoy sharing new technology tools and digital resources. Make sure to share some of these with your peer educators as well. Great resources are released continuously, and we grow stronger by sharing information with each other.