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Abilock, Debbie, Kristin Fontichiaro, and Violet H. Harada. Editors. Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers. Libraries Unlimited, 2012. 390 p. $45.00. ISBN: 9781610690416 When Loertscher and Koechlin introduced the concept [...]

In April 2015, U.S. House Representatives Luke Messer and Jared Polis introduced the bipartisan Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015, designed to significantly restrict how online education vendors can exploit the personal data of students who use their products. For some, the bill does not go far enough. It is evident that future prospects for student online privacy regulation hinge on many political debates to come--and encompass innovation, education, society, corporations, and democracy. News reports, parent concerns, and information from professional organizations like the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) have raised the bar on online student privacy protection. Common Sense Media reports that there is bipartisan national support among adults, even those without children in school, for "tighter regulations on student data…to ensure their private information is not exploited for commercial purposes and stays out of the hands of the wrong people" (2014). With U.S. policy in flux--and schools, vendors, and parents all responsible parties, this article provides information about current federal regulations governing school data privacy.

In this article Debbie Abilock and Connie Williams apply the processes used by a food testing organization that strives to develop absolutely the best recipes for popular dishes, testing each recipe until they arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most fool-proof recipe as their inspiration to develop a teaching recipe that would consistently engage students in open-minded inquiry, an infographic. An infographic is a claim expressed through visual metaphor, conveying the creator's fresh understanding of relationships, expressed through a judicious selection and arrangement of visuals, evidence, and text acquired during inquiry research within a discipline. They describe a process in which students develop a research question within a domain, investigate a variety of claims and evidence wherever they lead, play with connections and assess contradictions, and wonder about the possible significance of their findings. Abilock and Williams are sure that cultivating an open-minded disposition and thoughtful inquiry strategies will benefit students' civic literacy and creativity, and that students' thinking about the interaction between a complex text and images in the service of a purpose and audience will improve their reading comprehension.

In this dizzying world of click-and-go wikified information, everyone uses fast-and-frugal skimming strategies to evaluate information daily. The challenge is to teach students to devise accurate rules that take advantage of new technology to quickly judge the quality of the information they want to use. The author suggests several digital reading strategies, which include judging the importance of an article by taking into account reader feedback and ratings, judging the trustworthiness of sources by looking at their diligence in correcting errors, judging accuracy by finding out what other sources say about the issue, and judging infographics through an awareness of the creator's motivation and vested interests.

In an academic setting, sources of information that can help the author answer a question or make sense of a problem are judged on competence and trustworthiness. As she locates a written text, an image, or a person, and "interrogate" it, the author is working through a series of judgment calls that end in a summative assessment of credibility. That final, overall assessment is an iterative process and is based on three factors: (1) definition of credibility; (2) specific attributes of the source; and (3) application of rules of thumb that have worked in the past to identify credible information. In this article, the author discusses how to evaluate the trustworthiness of information and how to teach evaluation as inquiry. (Contains 7 figures and 1 footnote.)

Differentiated teaching focuses on the student--the varying needs, interests and abilities in the classroom--in order to design curriculum which results in student understanding through application. Some differentiation implementations are little more than tweaks, but if one is ambitious, differentiation modifications can require substantial time and effort. This article takes a look at the design cycle for improving literacy through differentiated storytelling. The author describes several situations on how to implement differentiation. (Contains 7 resources.)

Like a printed text, an architectural blueprint, a mathematical equation, or a musical score, a visual image is its own language. Visual literacy has three components: (1) learning; (2) thinking; and (3) communicating. A "literate" person is able to decipher the basic code and syntax, interpret the signs and symbols, correctly apply terms from an academic discipline or field of study, understand how things fit together, and do appropriate work. Visual "information" literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and use visual information. Just as reader response theory conceptualizes textual literacy in terms of an interaction between the text and the reader, a theory of visual literacy ought to take into account the transaction of the viewer with the image. To represent that relationship of the subject, the medium, the photographer, and the context with the viewer, the author modified the classical rhetorical stance to model the reading of a photograph. In this article, the author describes how to teach visual information literacy using documentary photographs. (Contains 1 table.)

One's commitment to intellectual freedom is manifested not just in the creation of a strong and clear selection policy or the celebration of Banned Books Week but by his or her willingness to examine his or her practices openly with others. In this article, the author proposes four questions to explore in one's teaching and in professional discourse: (1) Why should I make my selection process transparent? (2) What can I do to protect both students and the First Amendment? (3) How can I help students understand global censorship without imposing American values? (4) Why must I confront my deeply held beliefs? (Contains 1 footnote.)

Professionally, school librarians are faced with an explosion of choices--search engines, online catalogs, media types, subscription databases, and Web tools--all requiring scrutiny, evaluation, and selection. In turn, this support "stuff" forms a basis for making additional choices about how and what they teach and what they assess. Whereas once school librarians would ask "whether" evaluating students was appropriate to their role, now many are intent on learning "how" and "which" evaluations and assessments to use, as well as "what" to assess and "why", and feeling less satisfied with their final decisions. In recent years, in the face of pressure to document the value of the library's program to faculty and administration, to gain credibility with students and parents, and even to improve the attractiveness of graduating seniors in a highly competitive admissions process, some school librarians have chosen standardized information literacy evaluation instruments. They turn to these tests to help them systematically evaluate student growth, improve the library's program, and compare their students' performance against that of other students in similar institutions. Given the difficulty that people encountered when selecting from an array of jams, school librarians are also wondering how they will ever be able to choose from a cornucopia of evaluation tools. Whether librarians choose formative (ongoing) or summative (end-state) assessments, the author asserts that the key is backwards design (Wiggins and McTighe 2005), in which the type of assessment is matched to the kind of knowledge being assessed. Here, the author stresses that in certain cases, school librarians must decide to satisfice because "the goal of maximizing . . . can make people miserable--especially in a world that insists on providing an overwhelming number of choices, both trivial and not so trivial" (Schwartz 2004). In choosing assessments, the author suggests to read widely beyond the professional literature and experiment. Then pick only a few goals and match the assessment to them.

Includes 19 articles that address issues related to library skills and Canadian school libraries. Topics include information literacy; inquiry learning; critical thinking and electronic research; collaborative inquiry; information skills and the Big 6 approach to problem solving; student use of online databases; library skills; Internet accuracy; and Web sources. (LRW)

Outlines myths about gifted readers. Suggests that librarians are vital in nurturing gifted children by developing collections which respond to high abilities and diverse intelligences while honoring the chronological age of these readers, by creating responsive learning environments and using flexible teaching strategies, and by supporting variable groupings which respond to the needs, interests, and abilities of this population. (AEF)

Abby has requested a meeting with her principal, Paul, to talk about her plans for the library program. She has worked hard over the past few years to be an [...]

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) "Standards for the 21st-Century Learner" were released just as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) was refreshing its National Educational Technology Standards for Students in late 2007. These standards outline what students will know and be able to do with educational technology. In June 2008 ISTE released its National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers, which enunciated five ways in which teachers should integrate educational technology: "Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity; Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments; Model Digital-Age Work and Learning; Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility; Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership" (ISTE 2008). How do these standards relate to the professional practice of school librarians? As the authors reflected upon this question, they realized that these categories mapped effectively to the "School Librarian's Bill of Responsibilities." This mapping shows that the roles of classroom teachers and of school librarians are tightly aligned. (Contains 1 figure.)

A brand is an idea in the minds of one's constituents that is created by what one says or does. The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) describes itself as a professional membership organization, serving the needs of 10,000 school library media specialists in the United States, Canada, and around the world. In this article, the author questions whether AASL knows that its brand represents the approximately 66,000 full- and part-time certified library media specialists from the more than 95,000 schools in the United States. She contends that librarians now have a rare opportunity to build an inclusive participatory culture. They need to nourish a participatory culture and sustained innovation in order to advance the authority and credibility of their entire profession.

Boys and girls are educated side by side in schools, yet their experiences are profoundly different. Failing at Fairness (Sadker & Sadker, 1995), a report on the groundbreaking 1992 study [...]

Profiles Debbie Abilock, assistant head of the San Francisco School in California. Achievements; Personal philosophy on school librarians.

This article presents a snapshot of the authors' first restoration project with young children which grew out of a fourth- and fifth-grade forestry curriculum. The restoration project was part of a long-term plan for enhancing the wild areas of the campus for wildlife habitat and for educational use. It is a native oak woodland and riparian habitat, but with substantial areas of invasive, non-native plants. Plans included the expansion of the current restoration area, upgrade of the old nature trail, restoration of riparian habitat along the creek, and creation of a butterfly garden outside of the Environmental Center. All of these projects require the ability to accurately map the campus and then to input the data. This is also key to documenting the habitat's changes over time--both natural changes and those caused by the activities. In this article, the authors describe the students' process of restoring the habitat and what the students learned from it.

Professional learning nourishes practice. Sometimes we are able to navigate daily within a community of learners or find such fellowship online. At other moments we seek out books and journals to stimulate inner voyages. The author describes how different books, journals, and Web pages have helped her along her own learning voyage. (AEF)

GROWING SCHOOLS: LIBRARIANS AS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPERS edited by: Debbie Abilock, Kristin Fontichiaro, and Violet H. Harada (Libraries Unlimited, 2012, 390 p., $45.00, ISBN: 9781610690416) When Loertscher and Koechlin introduced the [...]

Name: Debbie Abilock E-mail: dabilock@sfschool.org Position: Assistant Head of the San Francisco School, San Francisco, CA Recent Achievements: Currently editor of Knowledge Quest, published by the American Association of School [...]