Platinum Tech Newsletter to The SC Education Association (Blog 3)

https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png

Teacher Librarians: Integrating Social Media in the Classroom

A few years ago,  I learned of the SC Economics. When I clicked on their "About Us" link, it states that they have been around since 1975.  Who are they?  They have been providing decades of professional opportunities to teachers to help students establish sound economic principles for transitioning in the real world. I reflected on my time in my rural schools in Cades and Kingstree and NEVER remember any teachers EVER discussing economics other than the half-credit course in 12th grade—boring!  I would have remembered an emphasis on personal finances—it never happed! 

Do you see Peppermint Patty? That is me!  I should have taken that act to Hollywood.  Unfortunately, it was not an act.  I did not understand what was really going on in a place called school.  I spent hours in one classroom all day in elementary school watching all the hands around me go up, but never mine.  My teacher sounded like Miss Harbison, Charlie Brown's teacher.  Peppermint Patty is "rubbernecking" because the teacher is so dull. 

Lessons on personal finances and how it fits into the grand scheme of global world economics would have been so interesting to me.  The relevance to my personal life would have piqued my interest and I would have been engaged and wondered what was happening next.  Partly angry, I wrote the CEO, Jim Morris, and expressed my thoughts. He and I have spoken several times since then about how to provide digital financial literacy in this time of change.  Here is their website: SC Economics. 

 The Stock Market Game

However, I do remember that my classrooms looked like the one (below).  The teacher in front of the class illustrating a teacher-directed instructional strategy all day long.  The image is a little outdated, but are the practices outdated too?  Unfortunately, there are still classrooms in American public schools, and in the great state of South Carolina, that look like the one in the picture above.  It is incumbent upon teacher-librarians to "take the bull by the horns" and lead our teachers from "structuralism to student-centered constructivist activities" (Smith, 2010, p. 620).  I wish my teachers had been a little more innovative in language arts, but reading basals was the highlight of my reading in elementary and middle school.  In high school, we never read novels for class, only pieces of literature from the textbooks, which are normally excerpts. Even though I am a certified English teacher, I struggled with reading and literature throughout school and had to take remedial reading and English in college.  

This is important to me because Smith's (2010) mention of the landmark document in 1983, A Nation at Risk, prompted me to reminisce even more. Computer science?  We did not have computers in my school.  I just remember typing on manual typewriters, and later moving up to electronic typewriters.  I realize resources is a major barrier, as Johnston (2012b) found through an examination of librarians as leaders.  Leadership involves thinking outside-of-the box to engage students in English language arts classrooms.  One way is to use social media as a platform for teachers to integrate technology and students get the opportunity to combine ways to bridge information (Johnston, 2012b), they receive in both their academic and personal ways with social media as the vehicle.  For me, I like to to talk and interact with others. Does that necessarily mean I pick up the phone and talk? Of course not! I share articles, news feeds, educational ideas--right through basic text messaging.  English language arts teachers can use this same premise for incorporating simple text messaging or other type of social media where students are sharing and expressing about a specific text, article, poem, short story, novel, or any other text or piece of literature.  Here are some benefits that teacher-librarians might consider:  

Benefits of Using Social Media in Schools

Since resources is a major barrier, librarians as leaders must circumvent and circle past the things that they cannot change or have no control over, such as budgets.  Schools can hold refurbished phone drives in conjunction with community organizations to collect devices that can connect to the internet. As leaders, teacher librarians must garner support from school administrators to ensure the integration of social media by removing filters and installing a monitoring software instead for social media sites that teachers will use as part of their instruction.  Furthermore, English language arts teachers can establish digital book clubs in which they use social media to express comments about the piece of literature.  Teachers can take set parameters around what the students are expected to include in their posts, types of images, website connections, etc. as part of the assignment.  They can develop a rubic for students to use as a guide to include all of the requirement components for the posts.  Here are some ways that teacher-librarians might consider in making a start or adding to their instructional strategies and/or literacy-based programming:   

Technology Integration: 8 of the Most Engaging Classroom Social Media Activities

We must connect both academic and personal lives of students because disjointedness encourages dissension.  When students recognize the connection between their daily occurrences and their academics, the learning is improved tenfold.  The young people today were born into a digital world.  For "digital natives" (Smith, 2010, p. 619), we must immerse them into the digital culture because it is their birthright.  These indigeneous people have a right to perserve their culture and harvest it every chance they get.  We owe it to our young people to bury the antiquated English language arts teaching to eliminate the neck weaving exercises.    

Johnston, M. P. (2012a). Connecting teacher librarians for technology integration leadership. School Libraries Worldwide, 18(1), 18-33.

Johnson, M. P. (2012b).  School librarians as technology integration leaders: Enablers and barriers to leadership enactment. School Library Research, 1-33. 

Smith, D. (2010). Making the case for the leadership role of school librarians in technology integration. Library Hi Tech, 28(4), 617-631.