Increasing Library Use

Increasing Student Use of the Library

A middle school in Ohio went from maybe ten or so students coming through the library in one day to over one hundred students coming in to work on projects from their classroom. The principal of the school had seen the trend of schools turning their libraries into a kind of makerspace for their students in order to increase the use of the library. She liked the idea but she didn’t want it to be open-ended. Most makerspaces for kids have Lego sets, 3-D printers, and coding and computing tools. She wanted to turn it in to a place for the students to use tools they didn’t have in the classroom to enhance their learning. She wanted to extend the classroom learning to the library space. This principal turned the library in to a learning center. They moved all the books on to shelves that went against the wall in order to open up the space more. They got lots of furniture that was conducive to group work for group projects. They put as much furniture as they could on wheels to make the arrangement as flexible as they could. They have all sorts of interactive technology that multiple students can use at once. They are also talking with the local library to see if they can do interlibrary loans. This would greatly expand the books that students have access to.The teachers send the students down to the learning center with a paper that says which students are supposed to be there and what they are supposed to be working on. The students give this paper to the librarian when they go into the Learning Center as well as get their student ID card scanned.
I would love to see this done in more schools all across the country. It would make for a great resource for the students. They would have so much technology at their fingertips to make their work easier and more fun. Teachers could send kids a few at a time down to the learning center to work on projects. If students want to research for a paper, they can go to the learning center and have access to all sorts of research materials. If my school had this, I would probably assign more group projects so that they could make good use of the resources at their disposal. The one big road block that I can see for this would be how to afford the great technology. The school in the article was given a grant to create their learning center. All the technology is expensive and it could take a very long time for schools to be able to get any of it, let alone all of it. It’s a great idea, but may not be possible for a lot of schools.


https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/school-library/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is Meaningful Technology Integration?

Image
What is Meaningful Technology Integration?             For me, meaningful technology integration is when students and teachers both use technology in a way that enhances the learning of the students. It means that the teachers are not the only ones using technology. The students have access to it as well. The teachers are not just using technology for the sake of saying that they are using technology. I think another important part of integration is the cooperative efforts of the students. They should be able to work together using the technology. A picture I saw on twitter made a table of the differences between technology use and technology integration. One of the characteristics of technology use was that it was sporadic. I know a lot of classrooms that have SMART Boards in them. The teacher will use it to show examples of what the kids are supposed to be doing. In my practicum, my cooperating teacher will put on a game called Shark numbers and the students get to use the SMART B
Read more

Digital Literacy

Image
Digital Literacy I think that digital literacy involves more than just reading and writing online. Literacy in general has a broad definition. It can mean reading and writing. Someone can be literate in a certain area. Like hospitality or social situations. It can also mean reading a situation and determining the best course of action. I think it is the same with digital literacy. The person online has to read the situation and the vibe of the site they are posting to to decide if they truly want to post there. There are three different parts to digital literacy. Finding and consuming digital content, creating digital content, and communicating or sharing it. An education professor at the University of Connecticut, Donald Leu, has two ways of consuming digital content. He says offline reading is where you are reading a book on a kindle, or reading a PDF of a newspaper article. Online reading would be if you were reading that article on the internet and it had videos and link
Read more

Assessment

Assessment The Office of Educational Technology has a whole page just on assessment. It is very informative to teachers and the general public. It talks about how assessment is important and how technology can make it easier to assess where students are at. It talks about how using technology to assess their students, teachers can give their students real time feedback. Some teaching tools already have that. The website IXL gives the teacher a chance to watch as their students are working on the site how they are doing. It helps them identify problem areas and where they might have to reteach. The Office of Educational Technology page also talks about how assessment can only get better as technology continues to develop. It can provide the students with new ways for self-evaluation, peer feedback, and teacher evaluation. The article goes on to say that as technology and assessment improves, it is the responsibility of the schools to take the data from these assessments and use it i
Read more