Khan Academy

Recommended grades 6-12.  Khan Academy is an online tutoring website for students in upper grades.  Focused primarily on math, but with sections for science and humanities, Khan Academy starts with video "lectures," a teacher working out problems and then offers practice problems for students to work on.  This is a valuable tool as a re-teach, or as homework help.  If teachers and students create free accounts, they can work together to pick goals to work towards through the "coach feature."  Students can save their work and teachers can track and guide their progress.  This site has great potential for remediation, and for enrichment for students who want to go beyond classwork.  The site is very easy to navigate, and users can integrate their accounts with existing Google or Facebook accounts.  Highly recommended, *****

ALSC

Professional Blog.  The Association for Library Service to Children, or ALSC, blog offers great resources for information professionals working with children.  Whether at a school library, public library, or something else altogether, ALSC bloggers share great, concrete strategies and ideas for planning and carrying out programs.  Chock full of full program plans, book recommendations, and personal experiences of librarians "on the ground," ALSC is a great place to browse when looking for new ideas.  The blog is relatively easy to navigate; tags show topics as well as blog authors, and readers can peruse full articles without having to click on to separate pages.  Authors post pictures with program plans so that readers can get a better idea of program outcomes.  The ALSC blog also offers posts for librarians who want to stretch themselves professionally; a recent post was dedicated to learning about students with disabilities.  It not only featured the authors personal experiences, but also children's books that address different disabilities.  The ALSC blog is an excellent resource for those who want to stay connected with the professional organization and grow as professionals in between conference.  Highly recommended, ****.

Starfall

Recommended grades K-3.  Starfall is an interactive read-aloud site for emerging readers.  Young users can easily access four levels of digital material through the webpage.  Much of the material is free to access, though some pages require paid accounts.  Books can be read-aloud to users all the way through or by clicking on individual words, an excellent feature for readers trying to practice their own fluency and accuracy.  Another great benefit is that stories are broken into specific sounds, so they complement reading instruction in the early grades.  This is an excellent resource for teachers working on guided practice and read alouds to build confidence on specific sounds.  Recommended, ***

Storyline Online

Recommended grades K-3.  Storyline Online is a wonderful effort put forward by the Screen Actor's Guild to promote reading.  The site features videos well-known actors reading their favorite kids books.  All videos have captions, so that readers can follow along as the camera zooms along the picture.  One of the best videos is Jason Alexander reading his own story, Dad, Are You the Tooth Fairy?  In addition to reading the book, Alexander describes how he came up with the idea for the story by listening to the questions they asked about the tooth fairy.  This book comes with a disclaimer and an opt-out for those young readers who haven't had the "tooth fairy talk yet."  The site is easy to navigate, colored in bright red and yellow, almost like a 1940s Superman Comic (and the fonts match the motif!).  One risk this site runs by using celebrities is aging; it is already starting to show some wrinkles with its video options for dial-up internet and lesser-known celebrities who have already faded (sorry, Caitlin Wachs!)  Overall a fun opportunity to see celebrities get in touch with their inner child, and hear some great stories while you're at it.  Recommended, ***.

International Children's Library

Recommended grades K-6.  The International Children's Library is a digital collection of children's books available online, free of charge.  Though the main page is a little overwhelming with small, hard-to read links, by selecting a "simple search" young readers will find a kid friendly interface where they can search by age, character type, and even by cover color.  As an international site, the collection hosts digital books in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Arabic, and Tagalog.  Users can search, as well as read, in their native language, or a new language that they are trying to pick up.  For this reason, this could be a great resource for high school level language classes.  One great feature is that users can contribute to the translation process of books new to the collection; they can create and edit translations in the system.  The International Children's Library is an inspiring project, and already very useful!  Highly recommended, *****