I am currently collaborating with two of our English teachers to co-design and co-teach research and content creation for digital research projects. Susan Lester (10th Honors World American Literature/Composition) and I began our project about three weeks ago (read more in this blog post), and I’ll be working with John Bradford (11th Honors American Literature/Composition) as of Tuesday for the next month or so on his twist on the project (more details coming soon). In both of our collaborative projects, we felt our students were not quite ready in terms of skill sets or prior learning experiences to completely open up the possibilities for a digital research “paper” or project although students do have creative latitude in choosing and designing their multigenre elements that will be integrated into the wiki based “text”; students also have the option to integrate multimedia into each section of their wikified “papers”.
the three of us felt torn in wanting to open up the options and not setting up students for utter frustration (to the point many would completely shut down) in terms of combining two advanced skill sets (new research skills and content are being introduced);
You know that searching various areas of the Web requires a variety of search tools. You are the information expert in your building. You are the search expert in your building. You share an every growing and shifting array of search tools that reach into blogs and wikis and Twitter and images and media and scholarly content.
You open your students to evolving strategies for collecting and evaluating information. You teach about tags, and hashtags, and feeds, and real-time searches and sources, as well as the traditional database approaches you learned way back in library school.
You work with learners to exploit push information technologies like RSS feeds and tags and saved databases and search engine searches relevant to their information needs.
You know that communication is the end-product of research and you teach learners how to communicate and participate creatively and engagingly. You consider new interactive and engaging communication tools for student projects.
● Include and collaborate with your learners. You let them in. You fill your physical and virtual space with student work, student contributions—their video productions, their original music, their art.
Know and celebrate that students can now publish their written work digitally. (See these pathfinders: Digital Publishing, Digital Storytelling)
Your collection–on- and offline–includes student work. You use digital publishing tools to help students share and celebrate their written and artistic work.
You welcome and host telecommunications events and group gathering for planning and research and social networking.
You realize you will often have to partner and teach in classroom teachers’ classrooms. One-to-one classrooms change your teaching logistics. You teach virtually. You are available across the school via email and chat.
They argue (or school administrators hear) that it is now up to the teacher and a more modern classroom dynamic to manage this rapid, Internet-fed information stream to support learning (Bonk 2010).
Persons outside the library profession often do not realize that much of the information found in lib
They assert that school libraries should continue providing access to both digital and print-based information for as long as possible, and that these goals are not mutually exclusive (Gray 2009)
Transform the library’s physical space into a collaborative work area that celebrates information gathering, analysis, and sharing.
At the core of a digital library is an e
Those 150,000+ nonfiction ebooks are not bargain-bin titles offered as a group purchase; they are high-quality titles selected from a wide variety of university presses and academic publishers. It is important to note that the library does not own most of them. T
They have created a Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA) model that is a win-win for both publishers and end users.
These "partnerships" with EBL and Amazon allow for a Just-in-time (JIT) approach to collection development focused more on access than ownership.
How can we help our students embed meaningful purpose into BYOT?
1. As educators and librarians we can model the best practices by balancing innovation with tradition and requiring high standards of critical thinking.
2. We can model our own learning in this new era by showing our own willingness to “learn, unlearn, and relearn ~Toffler” and allowing time to unplug and reflect on the meaning of our learning.
3. We can put people first! Teaching and librarianship are service-oriented professions. We are not books or buildings, we are human beings. We are not robots (yet). Just kidding on that last line. Putting people first requires admitting that they are more important than our tech gadgets which we all turn to throughout the day.