I often hear people ask, “If we have the internet, why do we still need librarians?”
This is something I’ve heard since the days of dial-up and continue to hear right now. It misses the vital role that librarians play in our students’ lives. It’s true that the information landscape has changed. It is easier than ever to create a work and publish it to the world and with a tap of a button, we access information from anywhere at any time.
But actually, that’s why librarians are more vital than ever. Here are some of the things librarians do:
I’m an idea guy. That is, I have a lot of ideas. As a teacher I would constantly improvise, come up with new projects, lesson ideas, tweaks to traditional assessments, and have an organic approach to learning in my classroom. But they were still my ideas. I was failing to value, foster, and spark ideas…
I received a Christmas gift in fourth grade that profoundly impacted my career path and thus the rest of my life. That gift was a VTech PowerPad Plus “pre-computer.” While just a toy, the PowerPad line of products from the late 1980s and early 1990s were functioning computers that featured, among a handful of educational…
As a previous math teacher, I have a soft spot for the pains teachers and students can feel when trying to use math symbols and expressions in technology. The same thing can be said in science when typing chemical formulas. Technology seems to play best with normal letters and numbers, rather than exponents, subscripts, fractions, and such. Although…
He finds that math scores went up by 0.20 standard deviations and English scores by 0.18 standard deviations, and the results hold up even when you control for “detailed student demographics, including residential ZIP Code fixed effects that help control for a student’s exposure to pollution at home.” Source: Air filters create huge educational gains…
In 2016, Tristan Harris, whose job title at Google was “design ethicist,” left the company to focus on a new nonprofit he called Time Well Spent. The goal of Time Well Spent is to reverse what it calls “the digital attention crisis” — the brilliant minds at Google, Apple, Facebook, and elsewhere who “hijack our minds”…
Microsoft has been trying to keep PC makers away from Chrome OS for years, and consumers far away from Apple’s iPad alternative. While Windows RT largely failed at going mainstream, and Windows 8.1 with Bing was never widely used, the software giant is experimenting with another low-cost version of its popular Windows operating system: Windows…
