Leading from the Library: Help Your School Community Thrive in the Digital Age (Digital Age Librarian's Series)

by Shannon McClintock Miller

The abundance of free digital tools makes amplifying student voices mo...

Student voices can be heard in a variety of ways and, in all actuality, our students don’t need us to use their voices. They have the tools available to them now. They are alr...

honor their voices

School isn’t the only place where values are created. Hobbies and interests that aren’t valued in school are often highly valued in other areas of the community.

For libraries, this is a way to showcase the work that our students are doing and celebrate their movement toward the goals of students meeting the ISTE Standards (and others) already discussed. By tying digital creation and student voice to library lessons,

the possibilities are endless.

some of your students will need help with how to use these tools, many won’t.

amplify and draw attention to the end results. Act as a consultant for how and what students are communicating and the most effective way to do that. Give your students choice in both t...

celebrate and showcase that work and amplify the voices...

past the days where the library is a single place and where your influence is relegated to people in the library space.

significant impacts on their local communities as well as the global landscape.

the library is no longer merely a physical space, and the digital components and catalog are just as important as the books and furniture found in the actual building.

One of the easiest ways to get involved locally is through a partnership with the public library.

can support each other’s work by connecting and promoting the programming in both spaces.

Following are some ideas for connecting with...

we are in a global economy; we all influence each other’s work. That greater library community is more accessible than ever.

power of connecting beyond your library are plentiful in the online communities that have formed in recent years.

Online spaces are not the only place to connect with others and your community.

local networking groups, library or tech conferences, Edcamps, or other face-to-face meetings.

think about each person you meet as an opportunity to...

“Just ask them what they’re excited about.”

everyone is excited about something.

create connections between the two of you whatever the topic.

once the question is asked, it’s important to listen to the answer and look for connections to keep the conversation going.

the bar is low for connecting beyond your school library because of the technology that is available to us,

overwhelming

many tools and options that it’s hard to ch...

When it comes to a digital presence, it’s not important that you’re everywhere; it’s important that you’re somewhere. Find the community that is going ...

in every community, the more you contribute, the more you will get out of it.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Whether these gaps involve access to technology and devices or access to a reliable internet connection, these are problems that we continue to address throughout our schools.

Libraries and librarians should see themselves as leaders in this work and be constant voices advocating for equity of devices and internet access for all of our students and families.

When we think about our students entering their classrooms, we know they will have very different experiences using technology based on the interests of individual classroom teachers.

Equity of experience doesn’t mean that all classrooms have identical experiences. Rather, it’s a focus on recognizing the time in which we live and utilizing the tools of the day. It’s no longer acceptable for technology usage to be an option based on adult interests or comfort levels.

While it’s convenient to label different topics as their own literacy, we feel that, when all is said and done, all of these topics come together and define what it means to be literate in today’s world.

all these “literacies” overlap and inform each other to create a truly literate person.

Critical consumption of information • Media • Research • Technology • Digital citizenship

If we intend to help students become members of a society that is driven, in many cases, by technology and digital content, these are critical skills that can help students throughout their lives and are far more important than an individual fact that we might assess them on for a single unit or lesson.

topics that will move your program beyond traditional definitions of literacy.

being critical consumers of information is one of the most important skills that we can teach our students.

bring structure and strategies to utilizing and verifying the information we find.

finding the most trustworthy sources, a willingness to seek multiple perspectives on a subject, and developing one’s own opinions based on reliable information.

understand, verify, and utilize the messages that we get from the various forms of media with which we interact.

Images and video have become even more prevalent through digital tools, so we must help our students understand the messages that they are both consuming and creating.

what we see is not always to be believed.

verify and actively seek out truth with a deeply developed understanding of media messages and the hidden purposes with which they are created.

it’s as important to ask what we are not seeing or heari...

because of the rise of information and digital tools, we all do research every day.

research is closely tied to information and media as a piece of the literacy puzzle.

it’s important that we question and analyze our results.