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The importance of school libraries in the Google Age

The importance of school libraries in the Google Age
Kay Oddone In Australia, access to the internet is almost ubiquitous. In 2014–15, 85% of the Australian population aged 15 years and over were internet users, with 99% of people aged 15–17 using the internet (ABS 2016). With such widespread access to information comes the commonly asked question: now that we have Google, do we still require libraries and librarians? This question is particularly being pressed in schools, where smartphones mean that both teachers and students carry a wealth of information in their pocket, and school budgets are increasingly stretched between a wide range of competing demands. Regular newspaper articles spread the gloomy news about the demise of the teacher librarian; articles such as 'Teacher librarians on borrowed time' in The Age (Preiss 2014) speak of funding pressures in Australian schools — but this is not just a local phenomenon. The situation is dire, but the battle is not over yet. Scholastic's publication 'School Libraries Work!' References Related:  Knowledge Networking for EducatorsEffectiveness of School Libraries

Australian curriculum metadata in the library cloud: Part 1 why. – Cloud Librarian DownUnder In late 2015 the library started a small pilot project with SCIS to explore if and how Australian curriculum metadata could be included into the global bibliographic record. This post explains why this is of interest. Part 2 will explain how the metadata was added. Background At the bequest of the School Principal, in 2014 the library developed a three year strategic plan which was signed off by the Senior Management Team [SMT] and the School Council. Support the curriculum and learning,Support student’s literacy and broader reading,Support student’s information literacy and research capability, andSupport documenting and preserving the School’s history and identity via the Archive collection. As the library now provides quarterly reports to the SMT against these priorities it was important to provide both qualitative and quantitative of how we are tracking. To reconfigure the library services and collections against these priorities we started to genrefy the collections. Like this:

School libraries and teacher-librarians: evidence of their contribution to student literacy and learning Dr Hilary Hughes is Senior Lecturer in the Master of Education (Teacher-Librarianship) program at QUT, an active member of QUT’s Children and Youth Research Centre and a previous Fulbright scholar-in-residence at University of Colorado Denver. She has contributed to several recently completed research projects and is currently a Chief Investigator for an ARC Linkage project entitled ‘Fostering digital participation through living labs in regional and rural Australian communities’. International research provides compelling evidence that school libraries and teacher-librarians make a significant contribution to student literacy and learning outcomes. After summarising previous research, this article presents recent research focused on Gold Coast schools. School libraries have the potential to be a vibrant hub for learning, information, reading promotion, creativity, student leadership and social interaction within their school community. The research literature Australian research Findings

Understanding Content Curation – A Refresh – Innovations In Education In the summer of 2012, I began an exploration of the concept of Content Curation, and what this meant for teachers and students. Little did I know at the time that my journey would involve curating…about curating. Given the task of providing professional development for teachers to curate resources for backwards-designed units, I started researching to better understand why the word “curate” was being used – so I set out to define what curation meant in the field of education, and realized early on in my research that student curation is where our focus should be. My original post, where I shared my discoveries and understandings, has generated more traffic than any other post on my blog, with hundreds of cross-postings on sites in the fields of education, marketing and libraries. For the past 5 years I have continued to curate information about curating, using the same Scoop It site I started in 2012. Personal Connection Sharing, Audience – Comments & Discussion Storytelling Like this:

Twitter for Newbies: why get connected? – Linking Learning It’s 2016, and we live in a social media age. Even without realising it, social networks such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter provide us with news and information on a daily basis. Traditional journalism uses it to get the inside scoop on what’s happening, and citizen journalists are capturing the news as it happens. What does this have to do with you, as an educator, and your choice to use Twitter? So much. Connecting on Twitter is a terrific way to begin building a personal learning network. Ferriter, Ramsden, & Sheninger suggest that there are six ‘common patterns of participation’ for users of Twitter: 1. So if I have convinced you to give it a go, read on for a step by step account of how to connect in the Twitter world. Step One: Sign Up! Signing up for Twitter is easy. Once you have signed up, the fun begins. Step Two: Learn to love the Twitter Interface Twitter looks different depending upon the device you are using. Step Three: Lurk and Learn! Step Five: Begin Tweeting Related

Why are school libraries essential? (Video courtesy of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians) Student Achievement More than 60 education and library research studies have produced clear evidence that school library programs staffed by qualified school librarians have a positive impact on student academic achievement. Read more. College and Career Readiness Today’s K–12 students will compete for jobs in a global economy. Lifelong Learners Imagine a place where all students feel welcome and encouraged to grow and learn. Collections by Destiny | Follett Collect, create, deliver and share in a whole new way with Collections by Destiny®. Destiny Collections creates new, collaborative ways for librarians, teachers and students to share free or purchased resources across the district, school or with other users. Students and teachers can access district resources in Destiny Discover and add them to any Collection. Collections is an exciting new way to share your resources! Collections are available with Destiny Discover version 15.0 or later. Features: Collections is the new Resource List, but better – because Collections is seamlessly integrated with Destiny library resources, you can add visibility and value to the resources you already own, plus add resources from anywhere on the web. Collections Information & Support For more information about using Collections, please explore our Collections Help Center

Should your online course sound like Serial? Krista Tippett knows how to connect with audiences. She hosts a radio show that airs on more than 400 stations across the country. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2014. And her show “ On Being” consistently lands in the Top 100 on the iTunes podcast charts. However, when I sat down to package the raw footage into course videos, I worried that the project might be harder than anticipated. Radio and podcast hosts like Tippett have much to teach the education community about how to build engaging digital content. The online course space, on the other hand, has remained dominated by the voices of white men. The platforms themselves are not exclusively responsible for this gender imbalance. So why are women having a hard time finding their voices in online classrooms even as they dominate podcast airwaves? Keeping It Real The secret to why podcast audiences are growing and attracting new voices might be authenticity. Supporting New Voices

Read. Research. Rest. Repeat.: School Libraries with Certified School Librarians MATTER! Someone recently said to me "Well once the students all have their own Chromebooks, they won't need to come to the library." I took a deep breath and I explained that one-to-one Chromebooks will cause even more of a demand for research and information literacy skills and a certified school librarian to teach them.It seems our world today is quick to turn to Google and social media for information without question. The library has always been a place to do and to learn HOW to perform research. The "old" school library was a room filled with books, a few magazines, newspapers, and perhaps some slideshows and VHS tapes. Students found information in print sources alone. Many people don't care. Students love to "Google" the answers to everything.

8. Anyone Can Teach Anything — Everyone Can Study Any Topic — Content Curation Official Guide Today, if you want to learn about something, you don’t need to go back to school or to a university. Unless you are looking for an official degree from that very institution. But in all other cases, if your main goal is actually to learn something specific, independently of certifications and pieces of paper that prove it, there are a growing number of private, for-profit and not-for-profit online schools and academies that offer you the opportunity to learn just about anything you can think of. Not only. You can even teach, or start your own school, even if you do not have a PhD. I myself, have been making the bulk of my professional revenue in the last 7 years, by running a small online learning campus for independent information entrepreneurs. The array of web services, apps and tools that are available today to create such online learning schools it’s quite impressive, though, in my opinion, it is not critical to making it possible. But you don’t need to follow the same road.

Bridging the Digital Divide As people working in the information industry, the ‘digital divide’ is an important issue that many of you will be aware of. The concept refers to the gap between those with opportunities to access information and communications technologies (ICTs), such as the internet, and those without such access (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). While information may be widely available online, many people are not able to access this information. And without this access, these people can be left behind in employment, education, and social connection. With the world moving to put everything online, certain groups of people are more vulnerable to missing out. People from low income households, people with disabilities, people living in rural areas, the elderly population and many more can be at a disadvantage (The Conversation). It is an economic and social inequality issue, and something that relates directly to the work we do within libraries.

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