After months of wrangling, Washington lawmakers late last night passed the basic education reform bill, which includes a permanent line item for school library materials—and an allocation of funds to pay for a certified librarian in every K–12 school by 2018.

This is just amazing!! At a time when school librarians are being replaced with paraprofessionals and library budgets are being slashed across the nation, Washington is going against the big wave. And as we all know, it is coming about because three moms were not going to let the library programs become sacrificial lambs to the budget knife.

This is an incredible testament to the tenacity and advocacy of someone dedicated to a cause. Can we replicate this in any other state?

I haven’t had a lot of experience with the administrative aspect of getting accreditation, but I was involved with the leadership of the Missouri Association of School Librarians when North Central proposed to eliminate the quantitative standards for libraries. As we all know, the 1998 standards no longer indicate the number of items that should be in a library or even how much square footage should be present. We worked diligently on our letters to North Central but to no avail as North Central with the school improvement route.

Currently the Accreditation Standards for Quality Schools has very little to say about school libraries:

Standard 3: Teaching and Learning

3.10 Provides comprehensive information and media services that support the curricular and instructional programs.

Well, at least we’re in the document, although the word “library” doesn’t appear any place.

Debbie in her original posting asks

A question – do we have a need for the old qualitative “guidelines” in addition to the more general learning standards? Are we better or worse off without them?

I ask the question of how important is North Central to schools at this point? I don’t really know. Is it important enough for us to discuss trying to go back to the old quantitative standards?

At any rate…

I’ve had lively discussions with my selection classes about why they are still buying print books. Of course, there are lots of reasons to do so, but one of the biggest drawbacks has always been the poor quality e-readers which are very expensive.  Of course, Amazon’s Kindle has made a great advance in this territory in the quality of the physical e-reader, but the cost is still an issue. Now there is a free Kindle application in Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

This means that you don’t have to buy the separate Kindle ($359) to go with all of your other fun technological toys. You can download your books (cheaper than the print cost) from Amazon and read them on the iPod Touch/iPod you have with you all the time anyway. Of course, if you have one of those other brands of MP3 players or phones, this discussion isn’t for you.

At any rate, I think this will continue to force schools to reevaluate their policies regarding cell phone use in the school. I’m not sure what the solution is, but the technology continues to march forward and the schools will need to come up with a plan for how to integrate the technology that is part of 99% of every student’s life. It could be that Janie is playing “Grand Theft Auto” but she might also be reading Crime and Punishment. This will continue to push schools and libraries to have the information available in a digital format that will be present at the student’s point of need — not when the library is open and makes it convenient.

I’ve not used the Kindle application for my iTouch, but when your Apple product can now hold hundreds or even thousands of books without buying the Kindle itself, it would seem that we are once again at a dynamic shift.

I assume someone is working on how libraries will be able to share this material. My undertstanding at this point is that the titles are not transferable from one device to another.

Will this have changed by next month?

Have we put so many restrictions on students that they perceive the school library nothing but another classroom? How many of our students are restricted by the labels put on books indicating the reading level from which they are not supposed to stray? How many students are restricted from what they want to read because there isn’t an AR test that goes with that title?

I think it may be illustrative of how students perceive those of us in the school setting and our facilities when this student specifically sings the praises of the public library.

Public Schools and Public Libraries, YouTube

watch?v=999ZEf2EpHgwatch?v=999ZEf2EpHg

It’s the best visualizatsion I’ve seen of the AASL Standards so far. Bravo.

To see those links embedded in the student’s posting was just miserable. I have to say that I will no longer be recommending Edublogs to my students. What a disappointment. I’m not sure where I’m going next, but there are a number of good articles out there discussing the alternatives.

One posting in particular from December 2008 (I am behind) highlights the big three free hosting sites: Edublogs, WordPress, and Blogger.

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2008/12/choosing-blogging-platform-and-why-i.html

I will be looking around. Has anyone had any problems with EduSpaces? It was mentioned in other postings. I would really like to stay in the educational atmosphere for my postings and those of my students.

It was interesting to read that some people are staying with Edublogs because it is the only blogging software that isn’t blocked by the school filters. I assume that can be handled at the district level. While that isn’t my problem at the university level, I would like my students to work in the environment they would most likely be involved in at the school level.

Guess there is no free lunch.

It is not a surprise that students find academic research more difficult than personal research. After all, it is pretty easy to Google and to Wikipedia our most casual questions (although many students reply that they consult Wikipedia for their course-related research as well.)

Some interesting findings

• students have a lot of trouble with language. If the students are unable to find information on their specific topic, they struggle to find the correct terms that describe their topic. The more technical the terms, the more difficult it is. (p.8)

One can’t help but wonder that we are so accustomed to casual searching through the Web that our ability to think in terms of categories and “subject headings” has waned a bit. After all, don’t we more often keyword our way through the catalog?

• Students in the report did value libraries in spite of our profession’s continual concern about our loss of the library’s importance in the research process. Because there is simply so much information available, librarians were valued as “navigational sources” and “information coaches” and the library Web site was valued as a place to go to databases. (p 10).

This is certainly a comforting finding. However, another part of the study shows that

• if students didn’t get the help at the point of need, they quickly went another direction. (p. 11)

In other words, “we want it now” whether it is online or face-to-face help. If I can’t get it now, then I’ll go some place else to get it. This reminds me of my previous discussion about the need for 24/7 access to information. Doesn’t it make the digitization of print material by Google even more something that students will be turning to? For those school libraries that don’t have a Web presence yet, this means your information is becoming more irrelevant as each day passes.

Another point made in the report, and one that librarians have been discussion quite a bit is that

• formal library instruction does not have much value for the student — particularly is the instruction is too distant from moment the technique is needed.  (p. 11)

Yikes! How much time do we spend on library instruction? Does it make a difference when the elementary level students are learning everything about the library versus the high school student who is looking for specific information?

Interesting stuff. Be sure to read the entire report. There is so much more there than the couple of things I picked out today.

“Learning to Change, Changing to Learn – Kid’s Tech”

http://www.schooltube.com/video/21838/Learning-to-Change-Changing-to-Learn–Kids-Tech

I love this video. It bespeaks the technology revolution that some of our students are involved in and demonstrates the tailwind created by their activity.

The mind just roils at all of the things librarians must do to continue their push to involve the LMC and its services into the dynamic creative life of students in order to remain relevant.

I feel for librarians. This is a tough age. Trained to share a passion for one of the sweetest specimens of common grace, books, today many librarians find themselves as little more than Internet monitors, reduced to pulling up pages of vacuous celebrities to kindle even the slightest spark of interest in their students. This spark, of course, cannot possibly last for more time than it takes a synapse to fire. The librarian–what does that term even mean in this digital age?–is thus a mere custodian of the hyper-short attention spans of her students. Ironically, she was trained to be the very opposite, to be one of the few voices in youth culture that urges “reading” and “thinking”–technical terms, I know–on youth.

Yeow! That hasn’t been my experience at all. At the high school level as a librarian, I have never experienced a more dynamic and exciting time than when we allowed technology into the library media center. At no time did I ever feel that I was a mere custodian. School librarians have the opportunity to engage students more than ever and at more levels than ever. Not only has our educational role increased – particularly in the area of  literacy – but we have the opportunity to enable students to produce information requiring a broader range of intellectual and creative intelligences than in the past — and all with the potential of an international audience.

Still, the whole reading thing is a concern. Every new study that comes out seems to mark a new low in reading scores and interest in reading in the “traditional” forms. As much as I love reading blogs and surfing the Web there isn’t any way that I can convince myself that I’m reading at the same level that I would be if I were reading David McCullough or William Faulkner.

Nevertheless, I’m not convinced that Google is making us dumber. I think we are still figuring out how to get through the novelty factor of whizzing through the enormous trough of information that is the Web. I do think that while the digital world has made our opportunities greater to interact with students and teachers, I think it is also giving the library profession the opportunity for renewed vigor in enouraging our teenagers to read beyond the latest shenanigans of our musical celebrities.

It is a terrific article with pictures and a video. Yee-hah! We need these rays of light amid so much discouraging news about underfunding of library budgets and library jobs going unfilled.