The School Librarian Reads

With this module, I really was impressed with how many excellent resources there are out there for teaching students information literacy. I really enjoyed browsing Common Sense Media's information literacy lessons, especially the ones for elementary learners.  One of my favorites was the " Is Seeing Believing? " lesson, which takes students through identifying fake or retouched photos on the web.  Slide 4 from the "Is Seeing Believing?" slide deck Honestly, I know some adults who would accept this photo as real without consideration, which matches the findings from a study mentioned in the School Library Journal article, "Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: a News Literacy Toolkit for a 'Post-Truth' World" (Valenza, 2016). The study authors relate that even high school students were surprisingly unprepared to question or identify potential conflicts of interest, untrustworthy sources, or doctored photos.  As our youngest students are coming int...

While reading the issue of Knowledge Quest and absorbing both the AASL National School Library Standards and the ISTE Standards, my first thoughts were just how dense the material was. With the AASL Standards, for example, there is so much to reflect on within each Shared Foundation, and then within each domain!  My first experience with the AASL's National School Library standards dates to last summer, while taking the course Literacy in the Content Areas. Unlike many of my classmates, I am not a teacher—I'm changing careers from journalism—so working within a standards framework is still something very new to me.  The article that I found the most helpful for understanding how the AASL Standards operate on a practical level within a school library was "School Librarians Level Up!" (Freedman and Robinson, 2019). I really appreciated the ways they mapped the standards to specific activities they'd completed with students.  Not only did this help me envision how to...