According to the author, we are all creators and consumers of media. Technology has made it easy to copy, paste, and transfer anything educators might want to use in their classrooms. As educators, school librarians have an obligation to honor the law and be the role models that learners and other staff members need them to be. So many times the…

For a librarian with an innovator's mindset, inquiry can be a collaborative strategy for continual growth. When a librarian innovates with their community, radical, human-centered change is possible. According to the author, school librarians see the needs in the communities across grades, content areas, and demographics. The best advocacy is…

A few months ago, the largest school district in Texas announced plans to close twenty-eight elementary and middle school libraries, claiming it was part of an effort to combat low test scores and discipline problems. Unfortunately, this troubling trend seems to be spreading. According to the author, multiple studies have shown that effective…

In the author's decade-long journey as a school library media specialist, they have witnessed an evolution in the role of education. In today's increasingly interconnected world, going beyond traditional literacy and nurturing informed, empathetic global citizens is becoming a fundamental aspect of our teaching and learning. The United Nations'…

When the author transitioned from being a public high school librarian to a librarian in a small, experiential learning-based independent high school, she learned that accepting the position meant accepting changing types of leadership, changing types of accountability, and changing expectations from a broader group of stakeholders. This paper…

J. Linda Williams was coordinator of school library services for Anne Arundel County Public Schools prior to her retirement. She served as AASL President 2005-2006 and is also a past president of the Maryland Association of School Librarians. Looking back on her 2005-2006 term as AASL President, Williams writes that she feels that particular year…

Learning analytics has been defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. The potential use of data and learning analytics in educational contexts has caught the attention of educators and…

The textbook is the single most defining source of content in US public schools. In the current economic climate, however, school administrators are looking for ways to control rising textbook expenditures by shifting to digital textbooks. In this chapter, we explore a range of digital textbook formats and applications and weigh their potential…

In this article, the authors describe an undercurrent to the school librarian's public professional narrative, a silent but steady divide between what should happen and what "does" happen. Increasingly, rich collaborative planning is the exception, not the rule. Many library collaborations, when they do occur, happen in minutes over…

The school library profession has gone through an evolution since its inception in the early 1900s. School librarians hold strong to unwavering core principles that remain true throughout time. Students today are tech-savvy consumers of information. With smartphones and tablets galore at their fingertips, they have access to all the knowledge of…

This essay explores what it might mean to read children's literature in elementary school classrooms through a queer lens. The authors argue that because queer theory has a history as a literary theory that destabilizes normative associations among gender, sexuality, bodies, and desire, it provides a set of analytical tools classroom communities…

"Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs (American Association of School Librarians, 2009) continues to support the four original roles of the school librarian identified in "Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning" (American Association of School Librarians/Association for Educational Communication and…

A "slow pedagogy of place" in (environmental/outdoor) education has been enacted by the two authors over the past three years in a third year undergraduate semester-long unit named Experiencing the Australian Landscape. An integrated practical and theoretical, de- and reconstruction of fast pedagogies is now needed, we believe, if…

The purpose of this study is to unfold the perceptions of school teachers about the importance of school libraries in developing academic attitude among students. It is an attempt to know the opinion of teachers, what they perceive about the effect of the sue of libraries. For this purpose, 560 school teachers (male= 280 and female=280) were…

In this article, the author asks the question "Where do students at your school get most of their information for research?" He states that if they are only using the Web, their research is probably on shaky footing. Using only print or using only digital resources often gives student researchers only part of the picture and provides inadequate…