Recent articles

7 Ways School Librarians Can Build Partnerships With Content Teachers
03/21/2023
Topics:
Many years ago, my school library professor, Ann Carlson Weeks, Ph.D., explained that school librarians should be “aggressively helpful,” meaning they should take a proactive approach to building instructional…

Help Parents With 3 Common School Tech Challenges
09/07/2021
Topics: Parents
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an increase of technology not only in schools, but in homes.
According to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics,…

Help Students Become Savvy Media Consumers
02/02/2022
Topics: Digital & media literacy, Fake news
In 2016, Stanford History Education Group conducted a study that showed students at the middle…

Teaching Fact Vs. Fiction When Seeing Is No Longer Believing
01/20/2022
Topics: Digital & media literacy, Fake news, Social media
When it comes to media literacy and our collective inability to tell fact from fiction online, there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on.
Take, for example, the widely shared…

Teaching #MediaLit and #DigCit? Start with social media
03/12/2019
Topics:
It’s no secret that students today spend a lot of time online, and that’s why educators need to ensure that our students are equipped with digital citizenship and media literacy skills to help them navigate the…

Teaching Digital Literacy in an Era of Skepticism
11/16/2022
Topics: Digital & media literacy
Scrolling the internet lately can be like stepping through the looking glass, where right is left and up is down. Fabricated news stories are going viral. Elected officials are declaring legitimate news stories fake.
Helping students…

11 Resources To Boost Student Media Literacy
10/22/2021
Topics: Digital & media literacy, Digital Citizenship, Fake news
Whether it’s recognizing fake news, media bias or just information overload, media literacy has never been more important.
While librarians, media specialists and writing teachers have traditionally taken the lead in teaching research skills and media literacy, it’s increasingly up to…

Use powerful openers to jumpstart student research projects
04/11/2018
Topics: Literacies
Rebecca Larson is using current event topics, like school safety and gun control, to inspire her student’s argumentative essays. A high school English teacher from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon, she knows that…

Media Literacy Starts With SEARCHing the Internet
10/23/2020
Topics:
Consider the word search within the bigger word research. Many teachers use online searches throughout the day as a regular part of classroom practices, but are we teaching students how to search effectively?
One way to teach this important media literacy skill is to…

Top 10 Sites To Help Students Check Their Facts
05/14/2022
Topics: #DigCitCommit, Digital & media literacy, Digital Citizenship
In a political climate where sharing fake news has become commonplace, it’s more important than ever to rely on trustworthy and dogged fact-checking services to vet information.
Our job as digital citizens requires more than…