Teacher Librarian as Leader

Social media-networked digital media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and wikis-enable people to socialize, organize, learn, play, and engage in commerce. The part that makes social media social is that technical skills need to be exercised in concert with others: encoding, decoding, and community. I focus on five social media literacies: Attention, Participation, Collaboratio,n Network awareness and Critical consumption

Teacher-librarians at VPS (Vancouver Public Schools) play a crucial role in this digital transformation and other strategic initiatives. As a result, they are expanding their role to spend more time in the classroom, curating digital content and lesson plans with teachers, teaching digital citizenship to students, and even emerging as technology experts within their schools.

AITSL resources for school leaders - this collection includes current reading lists, websites, multimedia and books. Although this targets superintendents, principals and senior staff, there is a wealth of information here relevant to educational leadership for all practitioners.

As we continue to look at teachers, students, and learning becoming more "innovative", it is important that leadership changes. As administrators often set the tone for their district or their building, if they are saying the same, it is not likely that things are going to change in the classroom. Leadership needs to not only "think" different, but they need to "act" different.

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The schools that are taking this seriously are still in the minority. But around the world there is a growing global movement towards achieving the vision of 21st century education. The Innovation Unit present their views of what this vision looks like in practice. 10 great ideas to shift your thinking.

Megan Daley's blog post before her EduTECH 2015 presentation.

Digital literacy refers to the skills, knowledge and understanding required to use new technology and media to create and share meaning. This week's article is adapted from the British report Digital participation, digital literacy, and school subjects: a review of the policies, literature and evidence , published by the Futurelab organisation . The article discusses students' current levels of digital literacy; literacy as it relates to information and the media; the relevance of multiliteracies and critical literacy; issues surrounding the use of technology in schools; and professional development requirements for educators.

Fleming & Kurt. (2015). Practical implementation of an educational makerspace: Part 3. A culture of innovation in an educational makerspace arises from student ownership rather than from the presence of high-tech tools. Owning the learning experience opens unexplored horizons to students because independent thinkers have the uncanny ability to strike out into uncharted territory. Educational makerspaces are the ideal environment to foster such independent exploration, but the map for creating engaging educational makerspaces remains relatively sparse.

Kurti & Fleming. (2014). The environment and tools of great educational makerspaces. This article, reprinted from the October 2014 issue of Teacher Librarian: The Journal for School Library Professionals, is the second in a series of three articles which provides a thoughtful and insightful examination of the philosophy and pedagogical underpinnings of the maker movement, as well as expert guidance on how to establish a program.

This article is a thoughtful and insightful examination of the philosophy and pedagogical underpinnings of the maker movement. The authors' analysis and argument are strong, and the benefits they tout are inspiring.

The new focus on participatory learners and more student-led learning has resulted in making the school library a destination. One hot topic hitting public and school libraries is makerspaces where students can create, problem solve, and develop thinking.

Makerspaces, sometimes also referred to as hackerspaces, hackspaces, and fablabs are creative, DIY spaces where people can gather to create, invent, and learn. In libraries they often have 3D printers, software, electronics, craft and hardware supplies and tools, and more. Here are some excellent resources for anyone thinking about setting up a makerspace in their organization.

I then delved into reading many articles and books about Makerspaces. I'm a teacher librarian in a junior girls' school and I saw how within our library an area could be created to encourage creativity using the numerous amount of technology we have in our library.

"People no longer have to come to a library to get information," she says, "so the library has to get people coming in for different reasons. Students need somewhere to socialize, create things and collaborate." Joan Ackroyd outlines how she turned around a traditional secondary library to meet the needs of 21 century learners