Vermont Information Technology Association for the Advancement of Learning (Vita-Learn)

by Amanda Thomas

Regular Price: $34.99

This practical guide outlines a vision for online and distance STEM learning at the elementary level, with creative activities based on eight STEM themes.

Online and distance learning may sound fairly straightforward. Instead of learning in a classroom setting, students learn at home with the assistance of online resources. But classroom learning does not always translate easily to online settings, particularly at the elementary level where children should be actively engaging in activities, exploration and discussion.

From designing a zoo, to learning to garden, to exploring the night sky, you’ll find eight STEM lessons that are creative, hands-on and engaging for elementary learners. Written for teachers and parents, the book unpacks STEM integration across multiple subjects, with connections to the ISTE Standards. The book also includes play-based lessons for young learners, and ideas for innovative design challenges.

Each of the eight lessons includes:
An overview of materials, resources, time and supervision needed.
Suggested resources to explore, such as simulations and virtual field trips.
Supplementary learning materials such as questions and quizzes.
Ideas for games and reinforcement.
Hands-on activities and engineering design challenges.
Connections to various content areas as well as children’s books, movies and art to keep the learning going after the lesson is completed.

Concluding with a model for designing online and distance STEM learning for elementary-aged children, this book will support teachers and parents in designing the types of resources and learning experiences they need for elementary students’ distance learning.

Audience: K-5 teachers and parents

Distance Learning for Elementary STEM

by Sarah Thomas, Nicol Howard, and Regina Schaffer

Regular price: $26.95
Three experts on equity and technology offer concrete, evidence-based strategies for classroom teachers to move toward digital equity in K12 settings.

Closing the Gap is an ISTE book series designed to reflect the contributions of multiple stakeholders seeking to ensure that digital equity is achieved on campuses, in classrooms, and throughout education. In this series, authors Nicol R. Howard, Sarah Thomas, and Regina Schaffer offer historical and philosophical insights while exploring challenges and solutions unique to teacher preparation programs, pre-service and in-service teachers, and instructional coaches.

The second title in the Closing the Gap series, this book includes:
Examination of digital equity and the “problem of practice” for teachers and coaches
Strategies for connecting the ISTE Educator and Student Standards to practice
Discussion of key challenges facing teachers in today’s classrooms, such as access, connectivity, limited resources, digital divide, and the homework gap
Research-based vignettes from teachers who have encountered and conquered some of the challenges addressed in the book, and from edtech coaches who have implemented equity-centered innovative professional development

This book helps teachers address the challenges of teaching in the digital age, providing positive examples and recommendations for achieving digital equity in their classroom communities.

This copy has minor damage. The top corner has been crushed, but the binding is secure.

Closing the Gap

by Michele Eaton

Regular Price: $21.99

Learn how to redesign lessons with technology to individualize and personalize instruction, transforming what learning looks like for your students.

Many blended learning initiatives start from the top down and are designed for specific populations or make drastic changes to a school’s learning structure. But any K-12 classroom teacher can find ways to leverage blended learning, regardless of the constructs of their learning environment. All they need is a willingness to rethink their role — moving from content deliverer to architect of learning.

In The Perfect Blend, you’ll learn how to create a “homemade recipe” for effective blended learning for your students. Rather than focusing on finding and implementing a specific established model, author Michele Eaton shows teachers how to embrace the flexibility of blended learning to take an active role as a designer of learning and, in the process, help students become advocates for their education.

This book:
Provides an accessible resource for teachers beginning to use technology, as well as master blended teachers who are looking for new ideas or strategies.
Includes templates and planning tools that can be used as is or modified to fit the needs of your students.
Focuses on understanding and reflecting on your role as a designer of learning experiences, and creating and using digital content in the classroom.

You’ll gain practical skills, strategies and lesson ideas for various types of blended learning thanks to examples from real classrooms and educators. Along the way, you’ll discover how to build on the skills you already have to support blended learning.

Audience: K-12 teachers and instructional coaches

The Perfect Blend

by Dr. Eileen Hunt Botting

Regular Price : $28.95
From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction—it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was—a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans—namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community.

In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child

by Shannon McClintock Miller and William Bass

SIGN BY SHANNON McCLINTOCK MILLER

Regular Price: $23.03
Written by a seasoned librarian and an education leader, this book guides librarians in becoming leaders in their school communities, with strategies on developing partnerships, empowering students and more.

The modern school library supports education in a variety of ways. One essential role librarians play is that of a leader who works collaboratively to build relationships, mold culture and climate, and advocate for the needs of students and the community.

In this book, a librarian and an education leader team up to reflect on the librarian’s ability to build connections in two ways. First, they discuss the benefits of bringing the outside world into the library through the use of social media, videoconferencing and other tools that allow librarians to partner with others. Then they expand upon these connections by addressing how librarians can lead in the greater educational community by sharing resources and strategies, and partnering with school leaders to tell the story of the school community.

This book will:
Highlight the potential of librarians to empower their students, their schools and their communities, and be learning leaders in the digital age.
Include stories of partnerships – from librarians and administrators – illustrating how they can collaborate to create change by harnessing the influence of the school library program to enhance the educational experience.
Explore how librarians serve as mentors to their students, delving into many topics that define digital age literacy, including the librarian’s role in reading advocacy, information validity, digital citizenship and research.
Make direct connections to the ISTE Standards for Students, Educators and Education Leaders in each chapter.

Through this book, librarians will discover the influence they can have on the school community as the library becomes the heart of the school, a place where problems are solved, content is explored, connections are made and discovery happens.

Leading from the Library - SIGNED COPY

Collection by ISTE

Regular Price: $28.99

This compilation of thought-provoking ISTE articles illustrates how infusing technology can empower learners and inspire meaningful learning experiences in the classroom and beyond.

Edtech can take many forms in K-12 education, not all of which result in learning experiences that prepare students to be future innovators and problem-solvers. Similarly, educators aren’t always provided with training or given the opportunity to maximize technology to its full potential. Without a road map or chance to see the tool in action, it can be difficult to know how best to implement it.

Edtech for the K-12 Classroom is designed to empower current and future teachers to use technology effectively in their classrooms and schools. In this second edition, educators share their stories along with powerful tips for leveraging edtech meaningfully by connecting the ISTE Standards, a road map for transforming education with technology. The articles in this edition explore research-based approaches to teaching with technology, considerations for ensuring equity and inclusion, emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI), and more.

Included in the second edition:
Examples for aligning lessons to the ISTE Standards to empower learners to be effective communicators, computational thinkers, innovative designers, global collaborators and digital citizens.
Digital resources – including videos, infographics and templates — for deeper learning.
Stories and tips from educators providing guidance on integrating technology, with suggestions for specific grade levels and subject areas.
Discussion questions to guide conversations about meaningful technology integration.
Educators should never feel they must go it alone. This connects the reader to a community of passionate educators who offer lessons learned and guidance on the transformative power of technology for education.

Edtech for the K12 Classroom

by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams

Regular Price: $11.98
This compilation of thought-provoking ISTE articles illustrates how infusing technology can empower learners and inspire meaningful learning experiences in the classroom and beyond.

Edtech can take many forms in K-12 education, not all of which result in learning experiences that prepare students to be future innovators and problem-solvers. Similarly, educators aren’t always provided with training or given the opportunity to maximize technology to its full potential. Without a road map or chance to see the tool in action, it can be difficult to know how best to implement it.

Edtech for the K-12 Classroom is designed to empower current and future teachers to use technology effectively in their classrooms and schools. In this second edition, educators share their stories along with powerful tips for leveraging edtech meaningfully by connecting the ISTE Standards, a road map for transforming education with technology. The articles in this edition explore research-based approaches to teaching with technology, considerations for ensuring equity and inclusion, emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI), and more.

Included in the second edition:
Examples for aligning lessons to the ISTE Standards to empower learners to be effective communicators, computational thinkers, innovative designers, global collaborators and digital citizens.
Digital resources – including videos, infographics and templates — for deeper learning.
Stories and tips from educators providing guidance on integrating technology, with suggestions for specific grade levels and subject areas.
Discussion questions to guide conversations about meaningful technology integration.
Educators should never feel they must go it alone. This connects the reader to a community of passionate educators who offer lessons learned and guidance on the transformative power of technology for education.

Flip your Classroom

by Dr. Eileen Hunt Botting

Regular Price $34.52
Artificial Life After Frankenstein brings the insights born of Mary Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life—and make life artificial—through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change.

In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.

Through their explorations of these themes, Mary Shelley and authors of modern political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor have paved the way for a techno-political philosophy of living with the artifice of humanity in all of its complexity. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Botting brings the insights born of Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

Artificial Life After Frankenstein - Hardcover

by Shannon McClintock Miller and William Bass

Regular Price: $23.03
Written by a seasoned librarian and an education leader, this book guides librarians in becoming leaders in their school communities, with strategies on developing partnerships, empowering students and more.

The modern school library supports education in a variety of ways. One essential role librarians play is that of a leader who works collaboratively to build relationships, mold culture and climate, and advocate for the needs of students and the community.

In this book, a librarian and an education leader team up to reflect on the librarian’s ability to build connections in two ways. First, they discuss the benefits of bringing the outside world into the library through the use of social media, videoconferencing and other tools that allow librarians to partner with others. Then they expand upon these connections by addressing how librarians can lead in the greater educational community by sharing resources and strategies, and partnering with school leaders to tell the story of the school community.

This book will:
Highlight the potential of librarians to empower their students, their schools and their communities, and be learning leaders in the digital age.
Include stories of partnerships – from librarians and administrators – illustrating how they can collaborate to create change by harnessing the influence of the school library program to enhance the educational experience.
Explore how librarians serve as mentors to their students, delving into many topics that define digital age literacy, including the librarian’s role in reading advocacy, information validity, digital citizenship and research. Make direct connections to the ISTE Standards for Students, Educators and Education Leaders in each chapter.

Through this book, librarians will discover the influence they can have on the school community as the library becomes the heart of the school, a place where problems are solved, content is explored, connections are made and discovery happens.

Leading from the Library

by Jennifer LaGarde and Darren Hudgins

Regular Price $25.99
From the authors of the bestselling Fact vs. Fiction, this book offers easy-to-implement lessons to engage students in becoming media literacy “digital detectives,” looking for clues, questioning motives, uncovering patterns, developing theories and, ultimately, delivering a verdict.

The current news landscape is driven by clicks, with every social media influencer, trained and citizen journalists chasing the same goal: a viral story. In this environment, where the race to be first on the scene with the most sensational story often overshadows the need for accuracy, traditional strategies for determining information credibility are no longer enough. Rather than simply helping students become savvy information consumers, today’s educators must provide learners with the skills to be digital detectives – information interrogators who are armed with a variety of tools for dissecting news stories and determining what’s real and what isn’t in our “post-truth world.”

This book:
Shares meaningful lessons that move beyond traditional “fake news” protocols to help learners navigate a world in which information can be both a force for good and a tool used to influence and manipulate.
Includes resources and examples to support educators in the work of facilitating engaging, relevant (and fun!) instructional opportunities for K-12 learners, in both face-to-face and digital learning environments.
Unpacks the connection between social-emotional learning and information literacy.
Includes access to the Digital Detective’s Evidence Locker, an online collection of over 100 downloadable and remixable resources to support the lessons in the book.

by Jennifer LaGarde and Darren Hudgins

SIGNED BY THE AUTHORS

As the authors state: “Remember, the detective’s job is NOT to prove themselves correct. Their job is to detect the truth!” This statement reflects the way they approach the lessons in this book, providing clear and practical guidance to help educators address and overcome this ever-expanding issue.

INCLUDES a free copy of "Fighting Fake News" a Jump Start Guide

Developing Digital Detectives - SIGNED COPY

by Dana and Georgia Glazer — Pre-orders for Dynamic Landscapes

Twelve-year-old Dawnah Dayton never thought she would be the last hope for humanity. She usually sits alone on the buddy bench during recess, makes slime, and plays with her pet rat, named Shiloh, who, amazingly, responds to her verbal commands. When Dawnah’s father takes her on a camping trip, the last thing they expect is to be thrust into the zombie apocalypse. But Dawnah soon discovers that zombies will do her bidding - just like Shiloh. With her dad, Shiloh, and a medical student-turned-zombie named Dead Med, they trek along the Appalachian Trail to rescue Dawnah’s older sibling, Tedi, who is at an upstate boarding school. Along the journey, they encounter many unexpected adventures, but when Dawnah’s power is found out, she learns that people can sometimes be more dangerous than the living dead.

Dawn & The Darkhearts - Pre-orders

by Amanda Thomas

Regular Price: $34.99

Through detailed lessons and examples, discover how to integrate technology in 6-12 math to amplify and enhance your mathematics teaching and drive student learning.

Instead of drill-and-practice apps and worksheets, what if technology enabled exploration of math concepts? Instead of screens for disconnected individual learning, what if technology fostered mathematical discourse and collaboration? Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching mathematics, what if we used technology to differentiate to meet students’ diverse needs?

Technology has the power and potential to support the teaching and learning of math content at all grade levels, but the presence of technology is insufficient unless it’s paired with effective teaching practices and meaningful content. This book poses and unpacks the above questions and many more, with examples that illustrate how to integrate technology in the 6-12 math classroom, highlighting opportunities to transform mathematics teaching through strategic technology use.

The book:
Illustrates two contrasting examples in each chapter, including transcripts of sample class conversations, mathematical tasks, illustrations of student work and reflection and discussion prompts.
Features discussion of research-based ideas relating to the contrasts presented in the chapters, encouraging readers to connect what they learn from the specific cases with the research on these topics.
Covers a variety of mathematics content areas such as functions and algebraic thinking, geometry and measurement, and data and statistics.
Provides strategies for implementing the concepts in class, with ideas and examples of tools based not on how they look but what they can do in your mathematics teaching.

Today’s technology offers more possibilities than ever for supporting students in mathematics. This book draws upon the latest research in technology and math education, while providing tools to incorporate effective strategies into curriculum right away.

Audience: 6-12 educators

Transform Your 6-12 Math Class

The Vita-Learn Bookstore has a limited number of books written by our conference Keynote speakers, often signed by the author as well as small selection of other books!

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