Digital Literacy

    A few days ago, a middle school librarian came in to speak to our Ed Tech class. My concept of librarians have been mostly limited to my experiences of the lovely ladies who staffed the libraries in my middle and high schools. I never asked them questions, beyond where I could find interesting fictions and references for an Affirmative Action research paper and the like.
   One of the big take-away messages of the day was get to know the librarian in your school! What an incredible resource of information, ideas and support they are to classroom teachers! The idea that someone, who is so much more knowledgeable about the range of good educational internet resources available, wants to help me imagine a new way to communicate chemistry ideas to my students is energizing! Without such a person, it seems as though I, especially as a new teacher, would end up overspending on valuable prep time to create lessons and find resources that I would hope to engage my students with. And how much time would I have to spend trying to assess the quality/value of the resource, much less figure out how to use it best in the classroom?
       I wonder if this is why so many teachers do not attempt to find a way to effectively bring students' devices into the classroom. Without resources for the teacher, such as librarians and tech specialists, is it reasonable to expect them to take on the internet as well as lesson planning and classroom management, etc? Having a librarian in my corner would definitely ease the pressures that come along with adding finding learning resources beyond the textbook and my personal experiences. (Note: She pointed us to graphs.net, which is a site that boasts that there you'll find "data made simple" through published graphs and infographics. This graphic on Google searching was found at this site.)
     One thing I found striking in her presentation to us was this reoccurring concept of digital literacy and responsibility. She shared with us that "we must approach BYOD policies as a valuable opportunity to teach students to responsibly and safely use tools they already have." This underscored again for me the responsibility we have as teachers to support our students in so many more dimensions and areas than the strict boundaries of our content areas.
    For example, this Infographic discusses your internet image and the increasing importance that your online reputation has in real, concrete life situations, such as job interviews and college applications. This particular company seems to be selling a better image than what Google would produce without money thrown into the pot. Teaching our students to be "critical consumers" of internet resources and "cautious and aware producers" of personal information (as well as other types of text and/or information) must go hand-in-hand with bringing digital devices into the classroom, which should be a "safe learning environment" (Standard 4).
    Overall, I am excited by the crack in the door that our librarians can help us open up further, allowing us to explore the learning resources available to teachers and students to make abstract concepts more concrete and lessons increasingly relevant to our "digital natives." I am excited too to find resources to help talk to students about media literacy and responsibility using media!
   To close, here are a couple other educational websites that I'm excited to have been introduced to and I'll leave for your exploration:

• Vintage Ad Browser's huge database of tech ads
• Larry Ferlazzo's crazy best-of resource lists
• Recycle Forward (through Digital Wish)
• AASL's Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2013