Connected Librarians

Tap Social Media to Enhance Professional Development and Student Learning

Nikki D. Robertson

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781564846419
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Standards

This informative resource for librarians is packed with practical tips and examples demonstrating how to effectively use social media to improve student learning. Once taboo in schools, the use of social media has become essential, providing schools with opportunities for outreach, advocacy and more. Today, it's often the responsibility of librarians to model the proper use of social media for students. Connected Librarians: Tap Social Media to Enhance Professional Development and Student Learning offers insights into the opportunities and obstacles of this exciting but sometimes challenging topic, including practical ideas for making the most of social media in your school library.This book:

• Demonstrates how to model responsible social media use to manage issues of privacy and anonymity within social media sites and apps.
• Provides tips on teaching digital citizenship, such as using a learning management system to create a safe environment for students to hone digital communication skills.Shows how to leverage social media tools to encourage reading and writing through rating and reviewing books, creating fan fiction and more.
• Explains how to use social media as a powerful tool to build your own professional learning network.

This book demonstrates how, through social media, educators can connect and empower students to broaden their learning experiences and become masters of their own learning. Audience: K-12 school librarians

PART ONE

Set Yourself up for Success

CHAPTER 1

Know Your Audience

I often joke that school librarians are the bartenders of their schools. Students, teachers, and support staff often saunter up to the circulation desk and share their joys and heartaches with us. We listen, nod our heads, furrow our brows, and smile. Sometimes from across the desk we slide them the perfect book that might give them perspective on their situation, assure them they aren’t alone, or offer a much-needed escape from the pressing realities of the world. After all, what happens in the library stays in the library.

Particularly for students who are on the fringe—the marginalized and those who just don’t “fit”—school libraries can be a place of refuge: a safe place where they won’t be judged or condemned, but instead protected and loved unconditionally.

My co-librarian, Gabriella DuBose, spent a confounding amount of time sitting, chatting, and listening to library visitors. We had books to catalogue, bulletin boards to hang, reading promotions to plan, collaborative lessons to develop; the list went on and on. I didn’t understand why she would waste her time socializing when we had so much work to do.

It took a while for me to realize why I needed to channel my inner Gabriella. None of the things I was prioritizing: perfect data in the electronic catalog, shelved books, updated displays (not to mention all the other job tasks of a school librarian) were as important as what Gabriela was doing. None. Let me reiterate: none of these things take precedence over building relationships with our patrons. We are a service-oriented profession, and the service we provide is not to books or technology, it is to the people we interact with every day.

Recently, a student needed someone to listen to her pain. She came into the library distraught over the death of her dog, her companion since she was a toddler. I dropped my to-do list for the day and contacted her teachers so they would know where the student was. I sat, listened, and cried with this student, sharing in her her grief. The time I spent with this one student was more valuable than time I could have spent creating a bulletin board or a report. Once we realize that people are our core focus as school librarians, it is much easier to reach our audience through social media, and assist them in making helpful, productive connections of their own.

Just as we teach our students to know their audience when presenting research, essays, or projects, it is important that we take time to consider our audience and purpose when using social media in school and library settings. Different social media platforms serve different audiences (i.e., students, parents, faculty, greater community, other educators), and they deliver information in different ways. We need to make a concerted effort to meet our varied audience where they are, instead of expecting to meet them in the location most convenient to us.

Advertisers have been aware of the critical importance of knowing their audience since the Golden Age of Radio, so it comes as no surprise that advertisers have adapted to the social mediums of the day (television, the internet, and social media) to connect corporate-sponsored products and specific markets. One of the most obvious examples of this is soap operas. Daytime radio programs specifically targeted women. Corporations, mainly soap manufacturers, sponsored the expense of producing television programs by advertising during these shows. These daytime programs, first on the radio and then later on television, became widely known as soap operas (Hiskey, 2010).

While we don’t have to sell soap to keep our libraries, we can learn from advertising companies. Telling our stories and sharing information about the variety of services our libraries offer is critical. We must be vigilant in keeping up with the latest trends in technology, especially in the technological fields that deal with communication. Keeping an eye on advertising trends can be a helpful and easy source for insight into the wide demographics of which we must be aware.

Students

When we consider students and social media demographics, we should keep in mind that ages range from thirteen to eighteen in schools, but we shouldn’t stop there. Most statistics reported for social media use among this age group are skewed for several reasons.

First, child internet protection laws prohibit the use of social media sites for students under the age of thirteen (Modo Labs, Inc., 2016). That certainly doesn’t mean that students younger than thirteen aren’t using social media. My sister-in-law set up Facebook accounts for her children when they were still in grade school, and I know many other parents who set up various social network accounts for their grade-school-aged children as well.

Second, students in this demographic, while not reflected in official statistical data, largely prefer to use messaging or anonymous social media sources because they prefer customizable, visual experiences over other forms of social media. Additionally, students “are very cognizant of the misuse of social media,” and are “concern[ed] about privacy and security.” The “combination of visual and impermanence in a mobile platform is the key to this generation’s technology interest (Modo Labs, Inc., 2016).”

Parents

Seventy-nine percent of online adults (ages 18–65+) use Facebook (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016). Given this statistic, it makes sense that one of the first places we share and celebrate student successes is through a school library Facebook page. When my grandson started kindergarten during the 2016–17 school year, one of the first things I did was go to the school’s website to see if, and how, they were connected to social media. I then immediately “liked” and turned on notifications for their Facebook page. Currently, the school library utilizes the schoolwide Facebook page. This is a perfectly acceptable start, especially if the person running the page is reliable and posts new library information in a timely fashion.

The win-win of using social media in this manner is that you meet parents in a place that they frequent on a regular basis, and parents see posts from your library in their Facebook newsfeeds. The interaction feels natural, keeps them informed, and makes them feel connected to their child’s school while not seeming like another chore they have to do.

Faculty

The way school faculty utilizes social media varies widely. Each school district’s technology department grants levels of access to a school’s various social media outlets. This is the number one factor that influences what, if any, social media is used by faculty. In a system that understands and embraces the positive impact social media can have on professional learning, parent communication, and community connections—and one that has a more or less open-access technology policy regarding the use of social media—the type of social media used can be traced back to two determiners. The first is modeling of social media use by administration. Teachers look to their administration for guidance because social media is seen by many as a gray area, and teachers do not want to say or do something on social media that would reflect poorly on the school. The second determiner is the age of the faculty members, which can vary widely. Age often determines what type of social media is used. Educators, like most of us, are drawn to what feels most comfortable and what we use in our personal lives.

Community Members

Using social media to reach community members most often requires the use of more than one social media outlet. Those used most frequently by school districts are Facebook and Twitter, which fit with the Pew Research Center study of demographics of usage (2017). Knowing the community member audience and disseminating information about your school through social media takes a concerted effort, so does developing a recognizable brand in the social media realm on behalf of your school or school district.

Other Educators

Social media is a powerful tool for connecting with other educators and growing professionaly through connections made outside of your own school or district. The approach you use depends heavily on the age demographic of the educators involved and what social media they personally feel comfortable using, and thus varies widely.

Future chapters will expand on each of these target audiences and provide tips, strategies, and real-life examples for using social media to expand your reach beyond the school walls to benefit students, teachers, parents, community members, and others.

CHAPTER 2

Secure Buy-In from Administrators and Parents

Convincing administrators and parents to allow social media in our schools often feels like an uphill battle for connected librarians. Administrators are understandably cautious about what, and whom, is allowed access to students, in both the physical and virtual worlds. While their actions may cause frustration, administrators are the protectors of our precious students, and they go to great lengths to ensure student safety; often up late at night with worries and concerns about the students they serve.

District technology coordinators ensure schools are compliant with E-rate requirements, and they manage bandwidth capability to meet the educational needs of the school community. More than that, district technology coordinators are defenders of the virtual gateway, which holds the key to amazing learning opportunities but also to people with nefarious intentions. Guarding this gateway is paramount.

Parents, including myself and my own daughters, are rightfully concerned about strangers who might harm their children, not just on a playground or in another physical location, but through technologies used every day in our homes and through everyday technology we use, like cell phones, tablets, and other smart or connected devices. With these dangers in mind, one would think the best thing we could do is to slam the virtual door shut and not allow students access at all. This approach, however, would leave our children more vulnerable and unprotected to potential threats because they wouldn’t have learned how to avoid them and received support for using technology safely.

This chapter will address some of the fears and concerns around social media and propose ways to approach this subject for positive change.

Winning Hearts and Minds

School librarians are in a unique position to partner with administrators and parents and set up parameters for students to navigate social media in an informed manner that can lead to enhanced learning and success.

Future-ready school librarians are educational thought leaders as well as child advocates. Fear and the desire to protect students often prevent administrators from conceptualizing social media as an integral part of our emerging, technology driven educational system. According to the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), various forms of social media use by students are viewed as not only essential, but commonplace, in today’s schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). Social media tools give students a voice to communicate with mentors, peers, teachers, subject area experts, and more. Administrators whose vision falls short in imagining the possibilities for social media to enhance and personalize the educational experience for students are ultimately hindering deeper learning. They are also setting students up for failure once they leave the safety of school, and are cul...