Photo: Thinkstockphoto

Many teacher librarians find ways to provide leadership through their teaching, programs, and facilities. As the recent Pennsylvania study confirmed, effective school library programs positively impact student learning. While library leadership is essential, it may not be enough. We must think bigger. As information professionals, we have the expertise, connections, and skills to extend our leadership beyond libraries and make ourselves invaluable to principals, district administrators, and other decision makers. We can help plan, articulate, and implement major programs that will define schools in the future. In this new column, which will appear six times a year, I’ll identify pivot points—opportunities for librarians to leverage our profession’s strengths to lead, teach, and offer support.

The Pivot: BYOD

Until recently, most schools didn’t allow students to use their own technology devices in the classroom. Despite students’ use of mobile devices elsewhere, many districts impose strict policies that force children to power down as they enter the classroom. Enter BYOD. Bring Your Own Device programs offer students and teachers access to the Internet and the permission to use those devices in the classroom. Some districts see BYOD as a strategy to fill technology gaps, while others see it as a way to better prepare students for college, careers, and life. Unlike 1:1 programs, BYOD classrooms include anything from smartphones to laptops. BYOD is about flexibility with students working and learning in a variety of ways—not unlike a high-functioning library.

The Points

Digital citizenship. Personal devices require personal responsibility in the form of digital citizenship. With the flip of a switch, schools can shift from aging computer labs and a “no cell phone” policy to students and teachers using almost any device at school. While teachers retain the ability to define when those devices can be used, the need for students to understand appropriate uses of technology is suddenly everyone’s business. Many teacher librarians have long promoted digital literacy, responsibility, and citizenship, often to the bemusement of other teachers. As personal devices come to school, teacher librarians can parlay this experience into an opportunity to collaborate with teachers, helping to solve a new challenge that all educators must confront. Whether integrated into library instruction or articulated with classroom content, expertise in digital citizenship becomes a vital asset in Bring Your Own Device schools.

Leadership. Teacher librarians can inform and guide decision making whether a district is considering BYOD or is well on its way to implementing a BYOD program. As digital citizenship connects teacher librarians with teachers, it offers a similar opportunity to connect with IT, curriculum, and other departments. BYOD requires districts to shift thinking about teaching and operations. Teacher librarians can locate and curate best practices, ideas, and resources for the benefit of both district leadership and teachers. When administrators seek out other districts to inform decision making, teacher librarians can tap into librarian networks to connect with kindred districts. Teacher librarians can also help review or develop digital citizenship materials, curriculums, or communications connected to the implementation.

Test beds. Finally, school libraries can serve as test beds to explore the use of personal devices in schools, offering administrators, teachers, and the public a safe way to examine a BYOD program. By providing proof of concept, a successful BYOD pilot in a school library might lead to a broader implementation. Overnight, your library can become the focus of the school and district, representing forward thinking and innovation.

Great school libraries have always been about providing access to both technology and resources to create a learning commons. BYOD extends this ethos to the entire school. As others follow our lead, teacher librarians can play a valuable role, supporting educators for whom this brave new world represents change and uncertainty. We know change and uncertainty. And we know digital citizenship, digital literacy, and educational technology. BYOD offers teacher librarians a choice: Do we step in to lead, teach, and support learning? Or do we leave our patrons to their own devices?

Mark Ray (Mark.Ray@vansd.org) is the manager of instructional technology and library services at the Vancouver (WA) Public Schools.

Photo by Smithsonian Institution

I’m just back from FETC—the Florida Educational Technology conference. I was there at the behest of Scholastic to talk about Common Core (CC). (I don’t work for or publish with Scholastic, so I wasn’t there to sell their books. They wheeled me in as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about Common Core.) The week before, I’d been in Alabama meeting with high school teachers and seeing where they are in the great leap forward. I’m writing to give you a report from the CC front.

When it comes to putting the new education guidelines into action, there’s one word for where we’re at as a nation: patchwork. The variance among states is astonishing: Kentucky has already had its first CC assessments, and New York is moving full-speed ahead, training teachers, librarians, and administrators for its CC assessments in May. For those educators in Alabama, this is all a very distant star. But when I say patchwork, the state level is only the beginning: district-to-district, school-to-school, even classroom-to-classroom, there’s been a huge range of responses to CC.

Having just attended FETC, let’s begin with tech readiness. As most of you surely know, it’s mandated that the CC assessments be given digitally. One Florida school has 10 computer labs with 30 desktops whistling clean and ready for use—so 300 students can take the tests simultaneously. A visiting librarian from Atlanta nearly fell over backwards when he heard that—the best he can hope for is one lab per school. There is some wiggle room on when a school or district or state must be ready to deliver digital tests, but there’s absolutely no shared timeline or standard.

Digital brings up the next splintering: in Florida, it’s mandated that 50 percent of school materials must be digital by 2015 and digital tutorials must be available for students. On the convention floor, I saw vendor after vendor with materials to fill that digital space: from math apps to flight simulators that teach physics to global connections that link classrooms to fully online learning programs. But who can afford them? In one Florida district, 100 percent of its students receive free or reduced lunches. Yes, the district qualifies for Title I funding, but its kids are likely to be living with grandparents or even great grandparents, with no digital access at home—while another Florida district is encouraging fifth graders to BYOD, because every kid has so many digital devices.

Technology is just the beginning of the beginning. What I’m seeing in schools is a kind of simmering civil war. On the one hand, teachers who have long believed that “once I close the door, it’s my classroom and I do it the way I know best” are often skeptical about CC, especially since it comes with questionable, but high-stakes, teacher evaluations. And on the other hand, there are teachers who are eager to try new teaching methods and tools. So the patchwork response to CC extends literally from classroom to classroom.

One reason for this piebald landscape is that many districts have invested in expensive programs that, frankly, are directly at odds with CC. (For more on that, see my column “(Mis)Guided Reading”. As a school librarian, what can you do? First, be of good courage: the high-pressure but equally highly mixed response to CC you are doubtlessly experiencing is going on everywhere—we’re all facing this moment of flux. Secondly, use this opportunity to seize the leadership reins. Everyone in your building needs your knowledge of good nonfiction and technology and your ability to scour the Net for best CC practices that other schools have developed. One wonderful Florida district made a careful analysis of which digital device best supports learning. What grabbed the top spot? The humble PC, because of its keyboard. And yet, I heard tell of a teacher in an all-iPad school who midway through the semester reported that she had a big problem: she couldn’t figure out how to turn the device on!

Right now, CC adoption is a crazy quilt. Make sure you’re right in the thick of it, pitching in to sew those pieces into a useful pattern.