Group items tagged

Common Sense Media partnered with Teaching Channel to produce this series of nine videos spotlighting how our lessons meet critical ELA Common Core standards for middle school.

Inform legislators about the importance of school libraries in helping students achieve academically, Show them school library facilities and the learning that takes place in them, Illustrate the new roles that school librarians play in teaching, integration of technology, and providing professional development for teachers,

SIGMS provides a community for school library media specialists to gather and learn about technologies that improve the operation and programs of the school library media center, increase access to information, and create a more effective and efficient teaching and learning environment.

The Media Specialists Special Interest Group (SIGMS) released an important advocacy statement, The Role of School Librarians in Promoting the Use of Educational Technologies to provide information on the role school librarians play in promoting the use of educational technologies in their schools and the need for libraries to have available technologies.  Please share this statement with administrators and other library stakeholders.

As educational technology transforms teaching and learning, many districts are finding that once-solid acceptable use policies (AUPs) must be updated to reflect students’ and teachers’ increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies and other digital media tools.

Clearly articulated information and technology curriculum and specific benchmarks. Your school should have a separate K-12 IL curriculum with clear grade level benchmarks. If your state has one, so much the better – use it. (Wisconsin’s standards are excellent.) But if not, write your own based on AASL’s Information Power and ISTE’s NETS standards. When an administrator, teacher or parent wants to know exactly what skills you teach, you can readily show them.

n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.