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School libraries changing with move to digital resources

Schools are rethinking the idea of the “traditional school library.”

As schools across the nation move from printed textbooks to digital materials and digital learning environments, school libraries are adapting to keep pace—and new advancements are changing the very definition of school libraries and library media specialists.

Many of today’s students do not know what a card catalog is, and challenges lie not in locating information about various topics, but in narrowing it down and determining whether resources are trustworthy or not.

Abilene Christian University (ACU) has transformed its learning spaces to encourage students to collaborate and create.

Billie McConnell, director of K-12 professional development at ACU, said university leaders wanted to create technology-rich environments that meet 21st century skills. ACU educators focused on ubiquitous technology and 24/7 access to information as they worked to create a learning environment that would cater to media-literate students who are innovators, problem-solvers, and lifelong learners.

“We’re not just one-to-one—I discovered that we’re three-to-one,” McConnell said during a Consortium for School Networking webinar. “It’s not your old library. It’s a very active place.”

One of the biggest parts of the library is the learning studio, which is a place where students can go to create different digital resources such as audio and video recordings, multimedia pieces, or link up to share ideas and brainstorm. The learning studio offers facilitators and tech specialists to help students when necessary.

“People often say that the library is going away,” McConnell said. “It’s really not—it’s a critical piece. It’s a place for community, collaboration, and it’s a place to find partners to help you in whatever literacy you’re trying to increase. That may be literacy in resources, media creation—those services are all there.”

And the stereotypical librarian is evolving into someone who knows how to locate reputable online resources and can help students learn how to use those resources in their research.

“I see librarians as media specialists,” McConnell said. “We still have literacy, whether it’s reading or research…the librarian is the perfect partner for the classroom. The role of the librarian has shifted” for the digital age, he said.

McConnell said thinking about physical learning space is critical even as school districts and higher education migrate to digital resources and virtual workspaces.

“The physical space doesn’t go away in the 21st century—it just starts to look different,” he said. “It’s not your father’s library, but it’s a wonderful environment for creating, thinking, and connecting together.”

Diana Suddreth, STEM coordinator in Utah’s State Office of Education, is working with a team to develop open educational resources (OER) that can be put into digital texts for secondary mathematics classes. Suddreth also is working on a statewide implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), where nearly 5,000 teachers can learn about quality math instruction annually.

Utah is unique in that it is facing a “perfect storm” in technology and other areas of education, Suddreth said. The state board of education adopted the CCSS in 2010 and addressed a technology expansion and how technology impacts students—at the same time that the state, which already is among states with the lowest per-pupil spending—began to experience additional budget constraints with the economic downturn.

“We want to view technology as something that is integrated into everything that we do,” she said. “We started creating mostly open educational resources” due to challenges around the economy and integrating CCSS and technology.

The state is supporting teachers as they develop lessons created from online OER, and is helping teachers use OER to build coherent units of study for students. Next, the state hopes to support district-level projects that can create actual textbooks using OER.

Utah hired a group of five authors to write an original math textbook [1], funded through the state office of education and licensed under the Creative Commons, that will be available to teachers across the country.

Teachers are creating mathematics tasks and adding those tasks to a wiki, the state is boosting creation of science OER, English/language arts digital books are supplementing classroom instruction, and the state is experimenting with online professional development.

“We wanted to make sure that by not having textbooks, we aren’t denying the students anything they shouldn’t have,” Suddreth said, referring to studies and data showing that OER and digital texts are effective.

“Going down this route hasn’t been without its issues,” she said.

Funding has been a challenge, because the state still must pay people to develop resources even though they are put into digital form. Funding also is necessary for teachers’ professional development time.

“We think about different ways of doing business, and it’s not all about economics—it’s also about quality,” Suddreth said. “There are quality resources, and there are not-so-quality resources, and going with the cheapest model is not always the best. Tech directors are the perfect people to make it really clear to people that purchasing the least expensive model is not always going to support teaching and learning.”

Other challenges include:

McConnell said that as technology changes learning, libraries are evolving and will partner with students and faculty to help everyone understand how to research topics and filter information.

“If I limit my students to simply what a textbook says, or what I know, then I’ve done them a disservice,” McConnell said. “I almost hate to call it a textbook…calling it a textbook gives people the impression that it looks like a printed text. It’s going to look totally different.”

“If we’re going to pretend that what we’re going to do is create what we already have, but in the digital format, we’re missing the potential,” Suddreth said.