Knowing is Half the Battle

 If you are a child of the 80s or early 90s, you might remember the famous G.I Joe line, "Now you know. And knowing is half the battle." 

After taking in all of this week's resources, I think for our 21st century students, knowing is really only a quarter of the battle. Gone are the days when it was "easy" to decide if the information you were accessing was accurate. The trade off we've made with having massive amounts of information at our fingertips is that we have to sift and sort through potential rubbish in order to get to the information of real value.

As the use and availability of technology has grown at an exponential rate, so too has the importance of developing information literacy skills with our students. Looking over the P21 Frameworks and explanations, I started thinking about how society and even educators' understanding of the word literacy needs to shift. In example, my school is planning a literacy night for February but the only teachers participating and leading the activities are the ELA teachers. It is going to coincide with our book fair, and the idea of "literacy" only mattering or connecting with the English content area is what this event is portraying. While the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of literacy is "the ability to read and write," I think we need to bring more attention to the second definition, "competence or knowledge in a specified area." Students in the 21st century must have competence or knowledge in many areas and without the ability to parse through what information is worth knowing, true literacy cannot be achieved.

The ideas surrounding how to teach and expose students to fake news, living in a post-truth world, fact checking, and their own information diets was helpful and overwhelming at the same time. I think one of the best starting tips was from Joyce Valenza's School Library Journal article, "Truth, truthiness, and triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a post-truth world." Valenza mentions some teachers' usage of "hoaky hoax sites" to teach about assessing online information and its validity. I was one of those teachers who used to use these sites to help my students begin to think about how to parse through the information they're accessing online. I'm sure most people have seen the site on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/), and this is just one example of what Valenza is referencing. 

Before analyzing the P21 Frameworks, listening to The Liturgists podcast, and reading Valenza's article, I probably wouldn't have felt bad about defending the use of these "hoaky hoax sites." They're funny, and they help create a dialogue. However, if we are going to help students approach information literacy and fact checking seriously, with the intent of producing more literate and intelligent citizens who will help create a safer, more equitable world, we need to use sites, lessons, and activities which match the importance and seriousness of these goals. 

We also need to model our own attempts at information literacy and what type of information diet we, as school librarians, have. I tend to stick to mainstream news sources i.e. NPR for the majority of my national and international news. I use social media to gain information as well, but I have tried to work carefully and diligently to follow a variety of people who are experts in their fields and who are in the habit of backing up any information they share with the original source or study. This has taken time and effort on my part, and I think we need to model this for students. Finding and deciding what to believe takes effort!

Showing students how to use Common Sense Media for information on the books or movies they want to access has been really helpful, as have their Digital Literacy Lessons - many of which we have used as a grade level at my school. Introducing students to games like Facticious or sites like University of California Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology and Society and their analysis of fact checkers are places to start. I really like the chart the CITS made regarding the most popular fact checkers:

Image source: https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/protecting-ourselves-fact

Modeling academic research and everyday news browsing should also be parts of this process. These could include reminding students to check multiple sources to back up information for both research projects and news about celebrities and encouraging students to use search engines like Duck Duck Go or Qwant instead of Google to avoid getting stuck in echo-chamber like environments because of algorithms. 

Finally, I love what John Green discusses in his Crash Course video on Fact Checking. We need to encourage students to be critical, curious, and skeptical of the information they hear and see while explaining the dangers of becoming cynical and assuming all information is false (10:17 into the video).

 

We can only do this by continuing to help them analyze their own information diets and the biases we all have and need to recognize in the information we come across daily. A challenge, but a challenge I think we are all up to!

References:

CrashCourse. (2019, January 15). The facts about fact checking: Crash course navigating digital information #2 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZsaA0w_0z0

Protecting ourselves from fake news: Fact-Checkers and their. (n.d.). UCSB CITS. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/protecting-ourselves-fact

Valenza, J. (2017, December 20). Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. School Library Journal. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: How the AASL and ISTE Standards Work Together

 If you are already living in the world of education, standards and their frameworks are nothing new. Each content area and level uses these to guide and plan instruction. However, many educators are not aware of the important standards which also exist to help guide the relationship between school librarians, school libraries, and learners. Before reading the May/June 2019 issue of Knowledge Quest, I know I was not familiar with these standards, but I was familiar with the ISTE standards. Having this familiarity, I really enjoyed and connected with the article "Collaborating to Communicate: Librarian Reading Groups and Understanding Standards" by Courtney L. Lewis. The way in which she discusses librarian reading groups, and how they have worked together to unpack and create a strong plan for implementing these new standards was insightful and helpful as a soon-to-be school librarian. The way she focuses on the strength found in collaboration reminded me of the way the AASL standards and ISTE standards can collaborate with each other, and just as importantly, the way in which school librarians must collaborate with all learners and stakeholders to best implement both of these sets of standards.

Overall, I feel there are more similarities than differences between the AASL and ISTE standards. I think a large part of this is probably due to the AASL standards being reorganized and using updated language in comparison to the standards which were in place before. In one of the Explainer Videos, they mentioned updating the band language so that it was aligned more closely with the inquiry method, which is a currently a large part of the expectations for learners.

For example, here is a brief screen recording of the AASL and ISTE Crosswalk which better demonstrates how these standards collaborate with one another (please excuse the background noise - my daughter's school is currently virtual):

All of this to say, when looking through, standard by standard and band by band, the similarities and connections between these two sets of standards are not difficult to identify or imagine working in a real school library space. Yes, there are certainly differences, and necessarily so. The ISTE standards were created to provide a more intentional guide for how students, educators, and leaders are using and implementing technology. Is technology being used to empower students? Are students and educators better able to create and collaborate because of technology? To me, these are the questions the ISTE standards bring focus to. The AASL standards connect to these questions, but using a different lens. The school library is a space which does use and implement technology, but is is also a space which supports learners in other ways. Not every AASL standard has an ISTE counterpart because the school library, librarians, and learners use technology as just a piece of how they are developing into 21st century learners and leaders. 

Now, back to this idea of collaboration and its importance. Not all educators or educational leaders may understand the collaborative nature between these sets of standards right way. It is necessary moving forward for school librarians to take on a leadership role within their schools to promote education about these standards and to promote collaboration between all school stakeholders. In some areas, the school library is still seen as a room with books, and the school librarians is not utilized by educators or learners to the fullest extent. Both the AASL and ISTE standards make it clear that without collaboration between all members, the high expectations set forth cannot be reached. 

In my final thought, I think a great place to start this conversation about collaboration (both between these standards and all stakeholders) is to remind educators of the additional roles and supports school librarians now play. One of the easiest ways to start this is centered around the inquiry method. Inquiry is applicable to all levels and content areas, and most importantly it is fun! Below is a graphic created by Trevor Mackenzie and Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt about how school librarians can support inquiry. I will also provide the link to the entire article by Trevor Mackenzie in my references section for anyone who is interested in reading it - I think it would make a great conversation and collaboration starter to share with other educators.

References:

American Association of School Librarians. (2021, March 9). Crosswalks. National School Library Standards. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://standards.aasl.org/project/crosswalks/

Lewis, C. L. (2019). Collaborating to communicate: School librarian reading groups and understanding standards. Knowledge Quest, 47(5), 36–43.

Mackenzie, T. (2019, April 22). How your Teacher-Librarian can be an ally when teaching with inquiry. KQED. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53417/how-your-teacher-librarian-can-be-an-ally-when-teaching-with-inquiry

Welcome to Checking Out Tech!

Over the course of this semester I will be using this blog to explore and elaborate on ways in which technology is being used and implemented in a school library setting. Check back soon for my first post!