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The 5 Best Free Tools For Making Slick Infographics

SIGMS provides the SIGMS SCANNER newsletter to its members to share current information related to technology for school librarians.

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.

I’ve created a PDF tutorial (using one of my most favorite tools for this, ScreenSteps). Feel free to download and distribute. It is meant to be used by students. The instructor will need to create a Facebook group, email the students with the URL and ask them to join, and then make the group Secret after everyone has joined.

This method should work very well, allowing students to complete everything entirely on their mobile devices. This eliminates the often confusing step of figuring out how to get the video off of their mobile device and uses free, web-based tools, while keeping everything private.

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.

These standards are interdisciplinary, and it is school librarians who can help teachers make connections among courses. It seems to me that the role of school librarians, more than ever, is one of leader, designer, and educator. They will need to insert themselves on curriculum committees, department meetings, grade level, and team meetings with the focus being how the library can connect all of the disciplines.

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.”