During the 1990's, the Ohio DeRolph Supreme Court case resulted in Ohio's educational funding system being declared unconstitutional. The Ohio Educational Library Media Association (OELMA) knew the state could not reinstate a mandate for teacher-librarians without the state funding the positions. Leadership for School Libraries (L4SL) was formed…

"Standards for the 21st-Century Learner" from the American Association of School Librarians provides a superb set of standards for learners in K-12 and beyond. The main categories are (1) inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge; (2) draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new…

School librarians teach through collaboration with the classroom teacher, who comes to the library with a content assignment, and the librarian infuses it with information-skills lessons. But this type of collaboration is often hindered by various obstacles, including the teacher's reluctance to devote the time needed. This is the dilemma. School…

The topic of the appropriate job title for school library administrators has been written about in earlier literature but has not addressed the issue from the perspective of future school library administrators. This article presents the results of a pilot study that was guided by the research question: What do future school library administrators…

Aging covers and those that miss their mark and lead to sluggish sales are often targeted for makeovers, many times with good results. Up to 75 percent of Viking's books get redesigned, says Assistant Art Director Jim Hoover, because the publisher sees it as a chance to reintroduce a book to the market. Makeovers are considered the fountain of…

While there is no guarantee that competence in reading or writing results in competence in the other, the skills are related and research suggests that instruction in both reinforces the other. Recommendations strongly support the integration of teaching these skills. Indeed, the integration of all the language arts including speaking, listening,…

Engaging students to learn through play is not a new idea, and, based on how many animals learn that way, the connection is probably instinctual. For some educators, however, this concept is a radical notion that threatens to topple the wall that they have carefully constructed to separate work and play. Just as some media specialists, teachers,…

Like the other industries the United States once dominated, higher education is facing increasing global competition. Any strengthening of K-12 education will strengthen higher education in turn. In this article, the author opines that higher education advocates should also urge Congress to include school libraries and librarians in NCLB when they…

Screencasts are videos that record the actions that take place on the computer screen, most often including a narrative audio track, in order to demonstrate various computer-related tasks, such as how to use a software program or navigate a certain Web site. All that is needed is a standard microphone and screen recording software, which can be…

Driven by new digital technologies, the future of learning is increasingly interactive, individualized, and full of real-world experiences and information. Unfortunately, the average school has about the same connectivity as the average American home, but serves 200 times as many users, and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school's…

More than eight in ten Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year, and six in ten used their local public library. At the youngest end of the spectrum, high schoolers in their late teens (ages 16-17) and college-aged young adults (ages 18-24) are especially likely to have read a book or used the library in the past 12…

One of the benefits of working at the middle school level is the opportunity to work with colleagues in a variety of content areas; this not only makes work more interesting, but offers a multidisciplinary approach to learning that ultimately benefits the students. In the Londonderry (New Hampshire) School District, collaboration between classroom…

How can we as librarians bring children and books from a variety of cultures and backgrounds together to create a more internationally literate community? This workshop addresses that question with a discussion of what it means to be internationally literate as well as internationally-minded, followed by an outline of some evaluation criteria…

We examined the issues related to delivering service excellence through the lens of 39 graduating school librarians in written assignments for the final course of their certification program, as they focus on what is needed to apply standards to become an effective school library media specialist in the 21st century. Of the 16 issues identified,…

This spring, the Milwaukee district announced major cuts to local school budgets for next year. At the 400-student elementary school where the author works, the projected cuts meant that, despite a modest increase in student enrollment, they had to cut an additional staff position. Given that in the past few years budget cuts had forced them to…