In the past two decades, several U.S. states have explored ways to mainstream media literacy in school curriculum. However one of the best and most accessible places to learn this necessary skill has not been the traditional classroom but rather the library. In an increasing number of school, public, and academic libraries, shared media experiences such as film screening, learning to computer animate, and video editing promote community and a sense of civic engagement. The Library Screen Scene reveals five core practices used by librarians who work with film and media: viewing, creating, learning, collecting, and connecting. With examples from more than 170 libraries throughout the United States, the book shows how film and media literacy education programs, library services, and media collections teach patrons to critically analyze moving image media, uniting generations, cultures, and communities in the process.
Provides vision for strong school library programs, including identification of the skills and knowledge essential for students to be information literate. Includes recommended baseline staffing, access, and resources for school library services at each grade level.
This is the most comprehensive textbook on school library administration available, now updated to include the latest standards and address new technologies. This reference text provides a complete instructional overview of the workings of the library media center—from the basics of administration, budgeting, facilities management, organization, selection of materials, and staffing to explanations on how to promote information literacy and the value of digital tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasting. Since the publication of the fourth edition of Administering the School Library Media Center in 2004, many changes have altered the landscape of school library administration: the implementation of NCLB legislation and the revision of AASL standards, just to mention two. The book is divided into 14 chapters, each devoted to a major topic in school library media management. This latest edition gives media specialists a roadmap for designing a school library that is functional and intellectually stimulating, while leading sources provide guidance for further research.
This guide has been completely updated with all of the latest technological advances to provide an exciting, alternative approach to teaching first-year television production to high school students. A combination of class instruction and independent video action projects based on the concept of thematic mapping prepares students for a year-end video competition. The projects borrow knowledge from other academic subject areas to teach media and visual literacy, broadcast history, video production skills, and multimedia animation. Available in both teacher and student editions.
The Flickering Mind, by National Magazine Award winner Todd Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really works. American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement. All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing. At this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering. Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this way. Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be: “enlightened basics.” Broad in scope and investigative in treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it will define the debate.
