HPL
Teen Territory Blog

We're all chatting about this website this morning called Be Funky. It allows you to turn your photos into fancy, artsy pictures with very little effort. It's not a replacement for high-end photo editing software, but it's pretty fun to play around with if you want to have an original looking Facebook avatar. This is a photo of me that I ran through the different filters. It really only takes one click, super easy. Give it a shot!

We found this really fun website called XtraNormal the other day. It allows you to make your own cartoon movie, using their characters and their text-to-speech software. Here is a teen room ad we made for an example:



Like it? :)

Teen Choice: Vote for your favorite teen novel, author, and illustrator! Then check back here to see the winners.

Have you been to freerice.org?

If it was only an S.A.T. prep, vocabulary review, chemistry review, basic math review, painting identification review, and some foreign language review site, it'd be great.

But it does one better!

For every question you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated the United Nations World Food Program. It was founded in October 2007 by John Breen. Then, in March 2009 Mr. Breen donated the site to the UN World Food Program. You get the benefit of homework help/test prep, while knowing that, with very little effort, you're helping to feed someone who can't afford to be fed otherwise.

Good grades + Good deed + Hardly any effort = YAY.

We've added a link to NextReads under The Book Review Form.

What is NextReads?

NextReads is an email newsletter subscription service that provides reading suggestions for all ages in more than 20 reading interest categories.

You can sign up for whatever newsletters you want (Tween Reads, Teen Reads, Mystery, etc.) and you'll receive reading suggestions that are tied directly to your interests, complete with annotations and a link to our library's catalog. And the title selections are made by professional librarians.

The newsletters are sent out to subscribers on a regularly scheduled basis. Check it out.