libraries and education

A website dedicated to informing secondary students and their teachers of copyright law, plagiarism policies, and caveats in order to uphold literary integrity and digital ethics through a compilation of various media.

Getting kids to really focus on what exactly they are searching for, and then be able to further distill idea into a few key specific search terms is a skill that we must teach students, and we have to do it over and over again. We never question the vital importance of teaching literacy, but we have to be mindful that there are many kinds of “literacies”. An ever more important one that ALL teachers need to be aware of is digital literacy.

Fran Bullington - As an educator, I realize the importance of information and digital literacy. As a school librarian, I have been trained to teach information literacy skills. I collaborate with classroom teachers to teach lessons in which I incorporate these skills.However, the recession has had an enormous impact on school libraries. Many programs have been completely cut; others are being run by volunteers rather than a certified school librarian; and other programs have lost their assistants, whose job of handling routine procedures freed the school librarian to plan with teachers.

I noticed that the FCC is considering “a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.”

Although I applaud the intent of teaching digital literacy skills to our students, I question the expenditure of these funds. Why not instead funnel these funds into school library programs to allow trained, certified professionals to teach the skills?

I look forward to hearing from you on this vital issue.

Curation tools develop a range of skills for students including information literacy. This excellent set of slides by Lisa Nash looks at the growth of curation, its value to learning and provides an introduction to a range of popular curation tools.

Principals value their librarians. They also want them to be more visible leaders.

Those are just two of the interesting findings from a recent survey of 102 media specialists and 67 principals. In fact, 90 percent of the administrators that we surveyed think we have a positive impact in schools—and a large number also feel that our jobs are important.

Content curation will play a major role both in the way we teach and in the way we educate ourselves on any topic. When and where it will be adopted, it will deeply affect many key aspects of the educational ecosystem.