The Technology Gap

When dealing with the technology gap in schools it is tempting to teach to the lowest common denominator or to try to keep things fair. It is also common to expect the same things from all students. Students without access to technology then have to make an extra effort to go somepleace with a computer or rush to write a paper in a study hall or lunch period. Differentiated learning may say that students can complete their assignments and projects with different levels of technology. We also don't want to limit those who can achieve more by arbitrarily restricting them. Programs like bring your own device encourage students to use the means at their disposal. Arguments can be made that sometimes you're not supposed to use technology because you're learning the principle or learning something from the act of doing your own research. In such a case it would be understandable to say students aren't allowed to use a calculator or some device.

There is also a concern that differentiating instruction too much will make us lose focus from working to recieve funding to breach the technology gap. Applying for grants and putting a computer in every kids hand or somehow providing access certainly can be done as much as possible. Laptops grow old quickly and the technological advantage may not be worth the cost in some instances. Schools have an obligation to teach some amount of technology skills regardless of if students have access to computers at home. There will be some amount of students using school computers on free time or getting frustrated with a slow internet connection at home. The question is how much will we try to even the field and what will we expect from those who are able to do more and from those who aren't?

Visual Imagery and Tag Clouds

I like what the search engine bing is doing with catching images on the home page and links around the picture like a cloud to other relevant interesting searches. It seems really neat on the outside but the search results end up being a bunch of random things about penguins. This really illustrates the inadequicies of search engines. Some mobile providers have advertised voice recognition where you ask any question to your phone and get some answer from an online search engine. This usually only works well if the exact question was asked on answers.com or a similar site, that is if the phone even understands your voice. I like the images on bing though. A pathfinder for example might have an inspiring image that has a translucent cloud of the relevant topics but with more refined searches even vetted links.

Being a teacher librarian today involves technology. The management, access and organization of information have always been a part of being a librarian. Teaching these skills to students should be our central focus. There are interesting things going on with information on the web. Sites such as netvibes allow you to aggregate different forms of information from the web. This brings together various news feeds, social networking sites, emails and other continuously updating information. You can also add bookmarks or links to commonly used websites you're always going to. You can add a range of search bars and image searches making them all available from a central location. They call this a dashboard. Instead of your gas and oil temperature (which i never need to know anyway) you can have a host of other real time information conveniently organized. With maps and news scrolls it is a lot like a highly customizable yahoo homepage. Like yahoo, I would like my news feeds to scroll and be able to have pictures if they're attached to a news piece and I so choose. Something I havn't seen yet. There are always new widgets to add to the dashboard, not all of them seem to work though.

The begining

Hello and welcome to my blog. I have one mandate for this record which is to discuss what it means to be a teacher- librarian today. Many things we would think of as the core of the profession may or may not change. To say what is a teacher librarian today suggest there is some difference to the way things were in the past. Technology is of course the elephant in the room. Librarians very much deal with the access, storage and collection of information. This takes on new forms in the information age. Some would suggest that today the librarians position is compromised by users easy access to large amounts of resources on the home computer or in the palm of thier hand. It may be biased and it may be a stretch to make the comparisson that if there are more fires in the world this does not mean we need fewer fire fighters. The opposite would be true. I think of the internet public library or ipl, at first I assumed it would be some library type website that had access to ebooks, full access databases and materials we can pull off the website. The IPL is not that though. The IPL organizes, vets and authenticates websites that are publiclly available to you by searching google. Some people may enjoy having someone else do the work of deciding what is authoritative, what is credible. Some of us have a habit of not trusting another persons view on what is authoritative or what is credible information. Librarians can send students or others to appropriate websites often times even finding or telling a person exactly what sites to use. As teachers it is also our job to show people how to verify information, how to be discerning of information so they may find sources themselves if they're not willing to just take our word for what the truth is.