MEDIA SPECIALISTS' MONTHLY MEETING FOR APRIL

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Sorry it's taken so long to get this to you ladies, but I, like you all, have been extremely busy.  Because of this I decided to have April's and May's monthly meeting online. Please read the following articles.  I think you'll find them very interesting.  After reading the articles send me a paragraph or two about your feelings or reflections on them.  I will take care of your signing in for the meetings.

Larry

Ogden School District notifies librarians of job terminations

OGDEN — Twenty media specialists/librarians were told Friday morning they would not have jobs with the Ogden School District next year.

The cut is a “reduction in force,” meaning that no compensation is offered.

Administrators broke the news to the specialists at a specially called meeting Friday morning. Those present suspected something was up when they received an email and phone call earlier in the week to plan the meeting.

“We knew they were discussing budget cuts when they contacted us,” said Shelly Ripplinger, media specialist at Polk Elementary. Still, she said she was surprised they would all be cut.

The district will start using staff assistants to fill the spots. The change comes because the district is facing huge budget cuts, plus changes to retirement plans and the transition to the Affordable Health Care Act next year, said Ogden District Superintendent Brad Smith.

The change — which includes media specialists from the districts’ elementary schools, junior high schools and high schools — will save the district $930,000 per year, district officials say.

The district will retain two media specialists at the district level to oversee the rest of the staff assistants. There will be two part-time staff assistants at each school working 3 to 3.9 hours a day, allowing the district to not pay medical or retirement benefits to those employees.

Smith said Ogden School District is the only remaining district on the Wasatch Front to employ licensed teachers as media specialists in their libraries.

Smith encourages the media specialists to apply for teaching positions in the district.

Three Top of Utah school districts contacted Friday say they use licensed teachers in their secondary schools, although none have licensed teacher/librarians in their elementary schools.

Belinda Kuck, Davis School District library media supervisor, said her district’s eight high schools and 16 junior high schools each have at least one licensed teacher in their library/media centers.

“We have classified personnel in our elementary school libraries, but certified teacher librarians in all of our secondary schools, some with classified personnel assisting,” she said.

“Generally, accrediting organizations recommend you have a certified librarian in your school library. Research has shown over and over and over that, when you have a certified teacher/librarian in a school library, your test scores will increase.”

Nate Taggart, Weber School District spokesman, said Smith’s assertion of no licensed teacher/librarians does not apply to Weber School District.

“It’s not accurate,” he said. “Elementary school media specialists don’t have to be certified teachers, but all secondary school specialists do.”

Taggart said the Weber School District’s five high schools and nine junior high schools each have at least one certified teacher/librarian working in their library/media centers.

The same is true of the Morgan School District, said district business administrator D’Lynn Poll.

“Our secondary schools have certified teacher librarians, to help meet accreditation requirements,” Poll said. “We have one high school and one middle school. We also have aides who are overseen by certified teacher librarians.”

Box Elder School district could not be reached for comment.

The decision to cut the media specialists won’t be made official until the school board votes on the final budget in June, but district officials wanted to give the specialists ample time to find other employment.

School board president Shane Story said there is always a chance things can change before June, but the board and administrators felt it was fair to give the specialists ample time and warning.

He said the decision has not been an easy one for anyone in the district, but for three years, the district has been borrowing from its rainy day fund to stay afloat — and it just can’t do that anymore.

“When we look at other districts that don’t have media specialists, there aren’t drastic negative affects,” he said.

The media specialists don’t agree.

The district has had teachers, both last year and this year, serve as Utah Educational Library Media Association presidents and represent the state well in helping other teachers and media specialists better educate children, said Amy Jamison, media specialist at Bonneville Elementary.

She wrote an open letter to the district on Friday expressing the thoughts of most of the district’s media specialists, Ripplinger said.

“What I see happening is not good sense,” the letter states. “It contradicts the district’s mission to improve failing schools, support successful schools, and raise the bar for student achievement.”

The American Federation of Teachers Utah chapter has also weighed in on the issue.

“The firing of our media specialists demonstrates the lack of educational expertise that the current superintendent and board of education members have in meeting the needs of students,” AFT president Brad Asay said in a written statement.

Asay is looking into the legal rights the teachers have and whether they will be able to start collecting unemployment as soon as the last day of this school year.

He said taxpayers should hold the district and superintendent responsible for what he deems as unjustly firing teachers.

“It’s unprofessional, unethical and will not be tolerated,” Asay said of the decision.

Jamison said the Ogden School District is willing to sacrifice highly trained professionals already positioned in the school and replace them with the unknown. She added the district is already undergoing much change.

Other specialists are frustrated that Smith, nor any other board members, were present at the meeting to break the news.

Story said the human resources department knew how to address all the issues in the right way and that it was not an issue of them not caring about the employees but making sure their needs could be met by the staff that was available.

Many of the specialists don’t know what is next for them.

“It’s very heartbreaking for the kids,” Ripplinger said. “I think (the district) needs to look at other possibilities. I know they have, but I still think they need to keep looking at (other options).”

Story said the students are the most important factor. Both he and Smith said the decision is a completely financial one.

“We need to look at how we can least negatively affect student achievement,” Story said.

Five key roles for 21st-century school librarians

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Presenters at Alan November’s Building Learning Communities conference described how librarians today must curate, foster citizenship, forge connections—and more

By Michelle Luhtala

According to Joyce Valenza, teacher librarian atSpringfield Township High School in Pennsylvania and author of School Library Journal’s “Never Ending Search” blog, this is the golden age of librarianship.

Co-presenting a session at educational technology leader Alan November’s 2012Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference on July 19 with Shannon McClintock Miller, district librarian and technology integration specialist at Van Meter Schools in Iowa, Valenza outlined five areas in which K-12 schools should turn to their librarians to empower learners with valuable 21^st-century college and career readiness skills.

“Librarians are in the sweet spot of education,” Valenza said.

Given the unprecedented quantity of information learners are exposed to, the librarian’s role is more important than ever. Librarians help all students gain access to, evaluate, ethically use, create, share, and synthesize information. These skills are easily grouped into the following categories, she and Miller said.

Curation

Students have long documented their research in notebooks, bibliographies, and research papers, but the presenters described these containers as inadequate for the digital landscape. In the 20th century, content was king, but in this millennium, curation has emerged as the new monarch.

Valenza and Miller highlighted emerging technologies that help students showcase their progress as they acquire, organize, contextualize, and archive both existing content and new learning. Transparency is a critical component in growing what media scholar Pierre Levy calls knowledge citizens. The presenters stressed the value of teaching learners to purposefully contribute to society’s collective intelligence.

This concept is fleshed out in Steven Rosenbaum’s book, Curation Nation. School librarians, with their specialized training and background in collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating information, must now teach their patrons—students and educators alike—to perform these tasks.

The following curation tools were referenced during the presentation: Diigo,LiveBinders, Paper.Li, Pinterest, PearlTrees, Posterous, Scoop.It, Sqworl,Storify, Symbaloo.

Citizenship/Compassion

“With great power comes great responsibility,” said Valenza. Building society’s collective intelligence requires contributors to respect its infrastructure. This is the essence of digital citizenship.

Students must be taught how to publish their work for the real world, with their real identity (not anonymously), to build their digital footprint with purpose. This approach embeds authentic learning about the importance of intellectual property. If “public is the new default,” as Valenza prescribes, accountability is built in. When their own work is public, students better appreciate the cost of having published work repurposed without permission, particularly if they are taught to license their work under Creative Commons or other intellectual property licensing systems.

The presentation featured a 2010 study which reported that 70 percent of American colleges consult prospective students’ Facebook profiles as part of the admissions process. The study underscores the importance of teaching students how to monitor their digital footprint. A clear picture of their digital activity helps them better understand what Eli Pariser (a keynote speaker at the 2012 BLC conference) calls their personal filter bubble. It is fair to assume that students will make mistakes online. Supervision and guidance will help them rectify and learn from their mistakes. As is all aspects of learning, gradual release of responsibility is key.

Among the takeaways from Alan November’s 2011 BLC conference was the importance of instilling empathy and harnessing passion among learners. In this 2012 presentation, Miller described how her learners in a rural Iowa K-12 school of 600 students were empowered to make a difference by showing compassion for learners in other parts of the world.

For example, her students formed a Van Meter She’s the First chapter to send a Tanzanian girl, Neema, to a school where she would have access to technology. In their first year, they raised $1,000, meeting their goal. There were other examples that underscored Miller’s commitment to giving her students authentic opportunities to make a difference in their world and give them vehicles to broadcast their experiences. Not only did these opportunities enrich her students’ digital footprints, but they contextualized the impact of citizenship.

Creation

The participatory nature of 21^st-century culture emboldens students to create and publish content—all kinds of content, but particularly multimedia content. Given the opportunity, students will transform work into play. Audience fuels their creativity, not standards and rubrics. This is borne out in the work of cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito, who describes “…two different learning cultures—one that is about youth-driven social engagement and sharing, and the other that is embodied in educational institutions’ adult-driven agendas.”

Valenza and Miller described the importance of granting students permission to experiment and explore, and the time to reflect and process their learning, to make it into something new. Students need to take ownership of their learning before it becomes relevant to them. Librarians, who have always served as matchmakers of sorts—pairing books with readers, resources with research questions, and, more recently, problems with tools to solve them—should be the “go-to person(s)” to support learners as they construct their knowledge.

Choice plays as critical a role as time in this process. The presenters, who both teach in schools that encourage learners to use their own technology in the classroom, described Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) as a foundation for differentiation. Librarianship is being redefined by mobile technology. Finding teaching resources, evaluating, and synthesizing information are only relevant if students can access these resources. Given the wide array of distributive technologies for library services, it is incumbent upon librarians to empower students to use their devices for learning and productivity.

Connections

The very constraints of Van Meter’s small-town isolation fuel its culture of connectiveness. Miller helps her students build their own personal learning networks by connecting with experts and collaborators as needed—in real time when they can, or asynchronously when they can’t.

As the lone librarian and technology integration specialist for an entire district, regularly meeting her K-8 students on a fixed schedule, Miller does not teach alone. She models collaboration by forming instructional partnerships with educators around the world. Two Libraries, One Voice, a joint blog documenting Miller’s co-teaching experience with John Schumacher, Brook Forest Elementary School’s librarian 338 miles away in Illinois, illustrates how technology transcends geography in the new millennium.

Among the highlights of her partnerships with educators in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Philadelphia, Miller featured ongoing, multi-pronged collaborations that are open to any educator wishing to include his or her students, such as Somewhat Virtual Book Club and World Read Aloud Day. If George Siemens’ statement, “The network is the learning,” is true, then Miller and her colleagues built a formidable learning platform for their students—and many, many others.

Common Core

Invariably, there comes a time when either Valenza or Miller deliver a presentation where an audience member raises a hand to say, “Yes, but…” After the “but” comes a reference to state testing, instructional mandates, curricular requirements, and so on. In this session, Valenza and Miller collectively preempted that interruption by addressing what educators in 45 states are now facing—the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

According to Lauren Davis, senior editor at Eye on Education, there are five things every educator should do to meet the CCSS. Her list includes focusing on process, publishing for real audiences, and engaging in discourse. Valenza and Miller explained that curation, citizenship & compassion, creation, and connection embed experiences into instruction that make the CCSS gel for learners. They make learning authentic and relevant. Theyare the Common Core.

Miller illustrated this point by showcasing Van Meter’s curriculum, which is a crosswalk between the Iowa, CCSS, International Society for Technology in Education, and American Association of School Librarians standards. Van Meter teachers, including Miller, post their learning targets for each lesson. Their students are curating, behaving, creating, and connecting with a purpose—to meet learning standards. They are just doing it creatively, and in both schools, it is the teacher librarian who facilitates innovative, yet robust, standards-based instruction across disciplines.

Michelle Luhtala is the library department chair at New Canaan High School in Connecticut. She facilitates a professional learning community for more than 3,500 school librarians at edWeb.net/emergingtech. She serves on the American Association of School Librarians’ Board of Directors and serves on two Connecticut Digital Library advisory boards. Luhtala is a contributing author to Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers and is frequently published in professional literature for school librarians. She blogs at Bibliotech.me.