Episode 610: Digital Citizenship

Welcome back to  our final episode in Season Six of Linking Our Libraries! Thanks so much for working with us all season. If you are interested in getting clock hours for the work we are doing here, check out our website cmle.org, for our continuing education opportunities!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. We are happy you are here with us, working  thorough skills library staffers can use to be more successful!

This week we look at one of the big skills in school library work: digital citizenship.

Talking with us, we have a returning Guest Host, Bethany Kauffman, Media Specialist and Book Club Advisor at Rogers High School. 

The Basics:

There are a lot of different definitions of digital citizenship out there. Your school, or district, may have a specific definition for your work, and that’s great – go with that one.

Generally it means that school library staff work with students of all ages to help them learn to use technology well and responsibly . The American Association of School Libraries (AASL) says this: “Digital citizenship skills are interwoven all throughout the current AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner as well as many state-level documents for technology and information skills. Digital citizenship isn’t something that needs to be taught in isolation. As technology becomes more pervasive in our schools and society, it is important to model these skills in everyday life.”

So, it’s a tough job! Teaching people to be make good decisions, and to be their best selves is never easy; and when the temptations of being terrible and doing bad things are as large as they are online, these lessons are even harder to get across.

However, this can be a great tool for showing your administration how valuable you are in the library! Other people in the school may help to provide parts of these skills, but in the library you may be the only one who is focused on not only showing students how to search – but also how to identify the best resources and to throw out silly answers.

We want students to leave our library knowing that if they google healthcare questions, that the choice between results from the Mayo Clinic and Jo-Bob’s Hospital and Catfish Noodling Clinic is really no choice at all. Understanding why one is better than the other, and why we don’t need to send mean emails, unsolicited naked pictures, or death threats to either organization, can be a great way to demonstrate effective digital citizenship!

Yes, it’s harder when students see bad practices modeled across the headlines of the daily news, or from adults who should know better. But it makes our jobs even more important! And it makes you, in your school library, an even more valuable part of a student’s education.

Be sure you talk about this to your principal, to your teachers, to parents, and to any other stakeholders you can!  And we are always happy to help you advocate for better skills and help you tell your story of the value you are bringing to the education process!

Resources:

Books Read

And now we have one of our favorite parts of each episode: sharing books! Each of us will share a book we are reading. Links to each book will be on our show notes page, with a link to Amazon.com. If you buy a nice book – or anything else – Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits. Thanks in advance!!

All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir, by Erin Lee Carr

Delirium (Delirium Trilogy), by Lauren Oliver

Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before, by Karelia Stetz-Waters

Conclusion

Thanks to Bethany for working through all these ideas with us!

And, thanks to you at home for joining us this week! It’s always better when you are here to share ideas with us.

Be sure you are subscribed to Linking Our Libraries in your favorite podcast app – or just stream it on our website. We will be on hiatus for the next few weeks, while we produce and publish our book group podcast: Reading With Libraries. Subscribe to it in your favorite podcast app, right next to this one!

And we aren’t abandoning you here! We will keep this feed alive, as we always do, with quick Book Bites suggestions from our Guest Hosts. They will share their favorite books with you. And, of course, we would love to hear suggestions from you, so send us your favorite books too!

So keep honing your library skills, and we look forward to working through more library skills and ideas in Season Seven!