Comment on Integrating Social Media into the Classroom

On the Libraries and Transliteracy blog a recent post called Take the Plunge, Integrating Social Media into the Classroom highlighted four steps that librarians and teachers can take to integrate social media into the classroom. They include, letting down the filters cautiously, adding digital citizenship to the curriculum, watch student conduct and 'the law', and finally, teach with social media.

Students already know about social media - facebook, myspace, etc. We should be using it and teaching them how to use it wisely and appropriately. It is a great tool to reach out to students and to encourage involvement in discussion and education. Many libraries already have Facebook pages and Facebook groups. This supports communicating with technology and integrating technology. It would appeal to kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic and logical learners. Teachers and librarians need to do more to get schools to allow social networking access and show administrators how social media can be effectively used in education.

Comment on Reaching Forward 2010: Hyperlinked Services for Young People Slideshow

As I watched this slide show, "Reaching Forward 2010: Hyperlinked Services for Young People" by Michel Stephens, I was thinking of all the ways that school librarians could utilize hyperlinked services in their libraries.

The slide show talked about letting go of control and work with teens to create places (and staff) that are "welcoming, enabling and inspiring to young adults. connecting to students/users/teens in their spaces, be it physical or virtual. This includes allowing games, food & drink and cell phones in the library. It also means creating collaborative physical spaces - round tables, comfy chairs, cool events, plenty of computers. Create a place where teens can give feedback and make sure that librarians/staff are responding to the feedback and really taking into consideration their suggestions.

Another thing that is more geared to public libraries is to "embrace out of school time", where staff and librarians are trained to be "welcoming and supportive of youth". Could school libraries stay open after school, and be available as long as there are other activities happening on school grounds?

Lastly, the presentation discussed creating and engaging students via in-library games, posters, social networking worlds using tools such as flickr, polls, podcasts, delicious, etc.

Final thoughts on "What we can do"
* Don't be afraid to change
* Know it's ok to fail
* Involve your YA's every step of the way
* Be human
* Imagine
It may be difficult to incorporate some of these tools into the school library, especially if social networking sites are banned at school or the internet has filtering software.