Roche chapt 6.docx

6 Using Technology to Enhance the Library Experience Caroline Roche Introduction This chapter deals with the basic technology tools you can use to showcase your library to others. It will also inform you about the role that e-books and online resources can play in your library and what you should...

6 Using Technology to Enhance the Library Experience Caroline Roche Introduction This chapter deals with the basic technology tools you can use to showcase your library to others. It will also inform you about the role that e-books and online resources can play in your library and what you should look for when choosing the best fit for your school. Remember, it is not only the students who need to know about your library; the parents, teachers and governors can also have a positive influence on your service. Furthermore, using technology can be a great way to connect with authors and publishers. The library website Your website is how you show off your library to the outside world, as well as internally to your school. Your library can appear in several different places - on the school website, on the school intranet pages and on your library management system (LMS), if you are hosted online. One of the first things to establish is whether the school library is mentioned on the school website. If it isn't, then make it your priority to ensure that it can be found there. The library is a major investment for any school and they should be championing the work that you do. Placement is also important - it should be in the curriculum area, not tucked away with sports facilities. When writing about the school library for the website, make sure you emphasise all the good things you do - author visits, competitions and reading awards, etc. But make it generic-you don't want to have to change the script every year. Ensure that your name is on the entry as well, so parents or other enquirers know who to ask for. And if you have an online LMS then include the link there too. Other information you may find useful to include 88 CREATING A SCHOOL LIBRARY WITH IMPACT are opening times, how many items can be borrowed and for how long, and whether the library is open before and after school. If you have a school intranet then, again, it is important that the library has pages there too. Don't worry if you can't design them yourself, ask for help from the IT department or have a look at other departments' pages and find the one you would most like to imitate. Ask the Head of Department who designed the page if they can give you some help designing yours. The information you have on your page depends on what is usual for your intranet to host, but at the minimum it should: link to your LMS and to any other online subscriptions; highlight information about competitions and upcoming author events; showcase books; and advertise events like Black History Month. Try to make it engaging and appealing, a go-to page for students and staff. It is a great 'shopfront' for all the wonderful things you are doing in your library. If you have an online LMS and you can design the front page easily, you can also use this to showcase the resources in your library to everyone. Social media accounts The first question you need to think about before setting up any account is who are your primary audiences? Who are you intending to reach with each one? For every account, the demographics will be different and you will sometimes need to put different materials up for each one you use. Twitter For Twitter, your audience will not be your students. Some sixth formers may use Twitter, but it is not common for any younger students to have a Twitter account. However, you will be reaching the 'outside world' and so this will include parents (including prospective parents), governors, the Headteacher and fellow staff. Twitter is extremely useful for listening to others - especially· if you follow fellow librarians and other influencers in education. It is a great place to find out about the latest research and studies and to chat to fellow professionals. Remember that if you are using your school library account, you must have your professional 'voice' on. This is particularly hard to remember when you are tweeting from home, at the weekends or during the holidays. If you find this discipline too hard to master at first, you could just tweet when in work for several months until you get the feel of your professional 'voice', and then you will be able to extend to weekends and holidays. Bear in mind that what you say reflects on your school and any negative comments may earn a USING TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE THE LIBRARY EXPERIENCE 89 rebuke from the Headteacher. It is also worth remembering that any retweets will be seen as an endorsement of that tweet or blog post - you need to read something carefully before retweeting or commenting. If you are unsure, check out the person's credentials and what sort of things they post about or comment on. If you also have a personal Twitter account, double check which account you are looking at before you say anything! Use the school Twitter account to showcase any activities and displays you are doing, ensuring you do not show any students' faces so they cannot be identified. It is a great idea to tag any authors or publishers that may be included in the activity or display - they will probably retweet you and · comment, which gives your tweet greater reach and publicity. The example in Figure 6.1 below includes people that SLG wanted to retweet the tweet and a popular hashtag so that it would gain visibility. Finally, a picture or a gif always increases the reach of your tweet by making it more visible in people's timelines. CILIP SLG @CILIPSLG· Sh It is a fact, backed up by research, that school librarians will help to support the mental wellbeing of children and young people as they return to schools. Not least by having great books for empathy and diversity. @'.C1l1Pm o @l'lickPoole1 tcovidrecovery Figure 6.1 Using images to enhance your Twitter posts For more information and advice about Twitter, who to follow and how to use the platform, see SLG's Key Issues leaflet on Twitter (https://tinyurl.com/ SLGWake). lnstagram This is the social media account that students are more likely to follow. You will also find publishers and authors on Instagram, so it is a good place to talk about books. Your content will be more visual here than on Twitter. Pictures of displays or new books in the library work well, especially if you tag relevant people for further reach. Be sure to engage with the huge community of book lovers on Instagram by using popular hashtags such as #bookstagram, #yafiction and #mgfiction, etc. You could also set up or take part in an Instagram Challenge where you take pictures on a theme each day. These are great fun and help you widen your circle on the app. All the other guidelines about your professional 'voice' are the same as with Twitter. You can also find an SLG Key Issues leaflet about Instagram (https://tinyurl.com/ SLGWake). Facebook You won't find many young people on here anymore- it is mostly used by older people to share pictures and stay in contact with friends, as well as by small businesses. Of course, you are free to open a school Facebook account, but check first if your school has its own general account and ask if you can put stories on there instead. This will give your stories greater reach as parents probably follow the school Facebook account to find out information about term times, etc. However, Facebook is a good place for you to join support groups and find out information from other professional associations and book clubs, but you must make your own judgments here. For any social media account you set up, you will first need to check your school's social media guidelines. The school should have a policy on this. You may also need to check with your line manager, or perhaps the Headteacher, before setting an account up so that you have permission to do so (given that you are speaking on behalf of the school). You may have to submit the password to the school, so they can close the account if necessary or pass the account on to your successor. Remember, these aren't your personal accounts, they are run on behalf of the school library. Very occasionally, you may get abuse on your social media account. Clarity and transparency are by far the best policy. Let your line manager and Headteacher know (whichever is appropriate). Screenshot the abuse, then block the person doing it. Remember, it is (rarely) anything you have done or said, especially if you have been following guidelines. The school will then manage any issues that might ensue. Online resources Online resources need not be expensive and there are some very good free resources around. However, if you can persuade your Headteacher or finance manager that buying into one or two paid resources is useful for all subjects, then you are more likely to get funding to cover these resources. You will need to do your homework first and find out what works best for your school. The best way to do this in a secondary school is to talk to the Heads of Department. Find out what they currently use and what they might like to use. If they use online resources for their department already, ask if you can set up a library page that collates all the links to existing online resources. This will keep everything in one place and showcase the usefulness of the library as a central reference point. Also, add links to free resources so that people get used to seeing the library pages as their first port of call. This could be the front page of your LMS, a page on your e-portal or on your website. How do you decide whether your school needs any online provision? Ideally, all secondary schools with a Sixth Form and Sixth Form Colleges should have online provision as part of training the students for university or any other further education. Online resources play a big part in the university experience and one of the roles of the 21st-century school library is to prepare students to navigate the world of information they will need for work. Just as we teach students the information skills to help them navigate Google, we also need to teach them to search the type of databases they will encounter outside the school environment. Primary school students will not need to have used the large and expensive databases that secondary students need, but some experience of searching databases, and appropriate word and phrase selection, would be very useful. All paid databases have a free trial period. Take full advantage of this. Ensure that the teachers who would be using it have the free logins and follow up with a quick questionnaire towards the end of the trial. If there is little enthusiasm for the database, however useful you may think it will be, don't buy the resource. My own experience has shown that if you don't get teacher buy-in to a resource, however good and however much you think it matches their needs perfectly, the resource will not be promoted or used and your money will be wasted. Just put that resource to one side, along with any notes you have made, and try again in a couple of years' time when you may have a different Head of Department or an enthusiastic staff member in that department who will promote the resource. A good way of managing the cost of databases is to split the subscription with the departments who will be using them. Don't forget, if your school offers Extended Project Qualifications (EPQs) or the International Baccalaureate (IB), many of your paid resources will be invaluable to students. Although your students will probably go straight to Wikipedia when they have something to look up, you can gently remind them that Wikipedia is crowd sourced and so everything they see there will not necessarily be totally accurate. With older students, it is a good idea to show them 'how to use' tips to narrow down their search terms. Google has a lot of different identifiers you can use to narrow a search down, in addition to the ones underneath the Search bar. Here are a few useful ones: Use Google as a dictionary by using Define: word you want to look up, for example, 'Define: alliteration'. Use a 'phrase in quote marks' to ensure that the exact phrase is searched for, instead of individual words. Very useful for looking up lines of poetry or song lyrics, for example, 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds'. Use a hyphen(-) to exclude certain words from a search, for example, 'dogs-labradors'. Use the+ sign to be specific about what you want, for example, 'labradors+rescue dogs'. To search a particular website, use a colon, for example 'Iraq:bbc.co.uk'. Use* to fill in for words that you have forgotten, perhaps in a lyric, such as 'Lucy * with diamonds'. Although students can use Google to perform mathematical calculations, it is much more useful for them to go to the free website Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) as this is especially built for mathematical and scientific calculations and will have all the information they need. . Another free resource is Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com), which has a lot of content hosted free, including many academic articles. It has an accompanying site where whole (or more usually partial) chapters of books can be read (www.google.co.uk/books). If students are signed into their own Google account, they can keep articles and books in their libraries to refer back to later. It would be worth your while putting a link to Wolfram Alpha and to Google Scholar on your library pages. For students interested in art and culture, Google has a free specialist site (https://artsandculture.google.com) that you can direct your students to. This site is more focused than ordinary searching. National Geographic (www.nationalgeographic.com) also has an excellent free site, with beautiful pictures and articles for geographers, artists and scientists. Politics students may like to know that they can search the House of Commons Library for free (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk). For Economics students, the Financial Times site (www.ft.com) allows free logins whilst on school premises by using your IP addresses. And for all students, but particularly Sixth Form, schools can also apply to the free Newspapers for Schools charity (https://newslibrary.newspapersforschools.co.uk), which allows access to every single national daily and quite a few regional newspapers as well. For younger students - Key Stage 3 and below - there is The Day newspaper (https://theday.co.uk). DK Find Out! (www.dkfindout.com/uk) is a great site from the publisher Darling Kindersley and is a simple, visual encyclopedia . . Finally, don't forget to put links to the Khan Academy (www. khanacademy.org), which is great for students eager to learn more about their subjects, and the educational part of TED talks (https://ed.ted.com), as well as the ordinary TED talks for older students. This list is by no means exhaustive and it is worth looking out for other good free sites you can use. Social media can be useful for finding out about these. As you can see, without having to pay out for expensive online resources, you already have quite a few resources available at your fingertips. If you know there is nothing free to replicate what you want, this will allow you to evaluate carefully which paid online resources you buy into. E-books E-books are a good investment for the school, but they are not cheap. There are several providers, all with different business models. Again, it is important to evaluate exactly what you want from an e-book provider and how it will integrate with your LMS. Some of the main e-book providers for schools are Browns Books for Students (www.brownsbfs.co.uk), Sora by OverDrive (www.overdrive.com/apps/sora) and ePlatform from Wheelers (www.eplatform.co). There is one legitimate site with free e-books and that is because the books it contains are now out of copyright. That site is Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks). Copyright, especially of e-books, is something you will need to be acutely aware of. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue has been highlighted as access for students to class books has not been possible. Teachers can put pressure on you to find free copies of books on the internet. To make it absolutely clear, there are no legal sites other than Project Gutenberg that provide free books. There are sites on the internet where you can find PDFs of books, but they are all pirated and it isn't legal to use them. You should not co-operate when asked to search for free books and let the teacher know why, or even the finance manager. This is because not only will the school itself be open to prosecution and being fined, but you personally will also be fined heavily for having downloaded the book. You can explain this to the teacher, who can then choose to take the risk themselves. However, it is morally wrong to deprive authors of their livelihoods, so much so that they may not be able to continue writing, and as a librarian you are expected to follow a code of ethics. You can find out more about this code in CILIP's Ethical Framework: https://tinyurl.com/ye2nkjaj. A similar issue applies to Kindles in the UK. Librarians in other countries will need to check their own Amazon agreements, as publishers have agreed different things in countries outside the UK. At the time of writing, there is no provision in the UK for educational use of thee-books you download onto Kindles. Although you are allowed to run up to six devices using your Kindle account, these must all be registered for your personal use. You cannot therefore buy a book on Kindle and share it with a class load of devices - this is illegal and may open you and your school up to lawsuits and fines. Confusion can arise as you can share books between up to six Kindles registered on the same account, but that is simply for your own or family members' devices. Amazon can, and will, delete all the books you have bought and downloaded if you are in breach of their terms and conditions. The only safe way to have e-books is to buy them through specialist e-book providers. As with online resources, check and see what level of provision would suit your school: some have audiobooks included in the subscription; some need a separate audiobook subscription; some allow online streaming; and with some you must download the book onto your device, thus taking up memory. First, evaluate the needs of your students and how they use their devices - do they have easy access to Wi-Fi at home or do they only use their data on their phones? The best providers allow you to choose either to stream the book on Wi-Fi or download it to your own device. . Many public libraries will provide e-books and other online resources as part of their offering. It is worth encouraging your students to join their local library. They need not borrow physical books from the library, but the online resources, including e-books, can be accessed without visiting the library and are free. The downside of this is that their borrowing will not be counted in . your own school library issue figures. However, the advantage is that you will be giving your students access to e-books and other online resources at no cost to you, as well as potentially increasing the range of titles available to them. Managing technology within your library Your school will have a policy on the use of mobile phones and personal computers. This is the first thing you should check when formulating use of technology in your library. Some schools have a very strict no phones policy and they will not want you to allow phones under any circumstances. Some schools allow phones at the teacher's discretion in lessons and at the librarian's discretion in the library. If this is the case, some things are still not permitted in the library - for example, gaming, watching videos for entertainment, phoning other people - but others - for example, using Kahoot and other quizzes, looking something up quickly rather than logging on to a computer, taking photos of worksheets to use later, using the phone as a calculator, watching course specific videos with headphones in - are allowed. You must think about what is sensible and will cause you the least work and · disruption. The stricter the policy, the harder it is to enforce and the more it will bring you into conflict with students, especially if they perceive you to be stricter than other teachers in the school. The same thing applies to personal computers. If your school allows students to bring their own devices (BYOD), then you need to consult the school's policy. In general, allowing students to sit on their computers and play games in the library is probably not what you want to happen - and certainly not if you are attempting to establish the library as a place where students read or study. Gaming can become competitive and noisy very quickly. It is much harder to pull back from something you have once allowed than to quietly ease restrictions, so consider the function of your room, make your decisions in consultation with your line manager and stick to the rules, making them clear and enforceable with students. If need be, use the school's behaviour policy to ensure that the rules are taken seriously - although it won't be long before this becomes the 'norm' and students know what to expect in the library. Other easy to use apps and websites As you start to become more confident, you will find there are lots of easy­ to-use apps and websites to help you reach your students online. Some are instinctive - like Wakelet (https://wakelet.com) - and some will need a bit more practice - like Canva (www.canva.com), which is a good way to produce posters, social media assets, animated resources and comics, although you will naturally get a wider range of uses with a paid account. Any list shared here will soon become out of date, so the best advice is to look out for courses to help you use them and give you ideas, or simply take advantage of free apps and trials to practice things yourself.