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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.

Planning is imperative for any technology initiative - iPad or otherwise. You need to ensure that you clearly understand and communicate how the technology integrates with your overall pedagogical objectives. Too many institutions purchase technology and then search for ways to utilize it ... or leave it collecting dust on the shelf.Planning needs to consider both infrastructure needs and the educational applications of the new technology. Without the proper preparation, technology initiatives are liable to become expensive failures.

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.

After a technology is developed, it generally takes years if not decades for management to learn how to leverage that technology to create efficiencies. Which means that the recent explosion of technology tools represents a huge untapped opportunity. A case in point: my new Droid smartphone. I have just begun to tap into the incredible stuff it can do. For example, have you ever been listening to the radio and said, 'Oh, I love this song. I wish I knew who sings it'? Well, now you can download an app for it. Your phone will listen to the song, identify it, tell you all about it and even let you buy it on the spot.

Instead of investing in scads of state-of-the-art computers and expensive commercially produced courseware, she says, the school district has made a remarkable investment in the high school’s human resources.

Common Sense Media's Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum maps to a number of national and Common Core standards. Use these charts to identify the ways in which our lessons and units help meet the learning objective for your students. English Language Arts Common Core (ELA) American Association of School Librarians (AASL) International Society of Technology Education (ISTE)

With a coming wave of new digital reading products designed to improve aptitude and provide unlimited access to online libraries, school districts have various options to help bring 21st-century learning in the classroom.

Some teachers and librarians say that digital reading products can personalize learning for struggling students and help interest young readers in nonfiction books, which are a major component in the Common Core State Standards Initiative designed to strengthen current state standards. As school districts across the country struggle under the weight of budget cuts, however, school administrators will need to be creative in finding funding sources.

“Librarians will always be an essential part of a school, but we’ll have to become more technologically savvy,” he says. “It’s all part of the evolution. [Technology] is another tool we can utilize to get more kids reading.”

Idaho SDE: BACK-TO-SCHOOL TEACHER TOOLKIT

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.