Our current AASL standards begin with 6 foundations: Inquire, Include, Collaborate, Curate, Explore, and Engage. Each of these foundations has four different methods for manifesting the competencies: Think, Create, Share, and Grow. Although the ISTE standards are not explicit with those terms as headliners, you can clearly see through our crosswalk that the terminology and ideas behind our standards overlap. For both, it is vital that we facilitate strategies that our students can become masters of their own learning. Look under shared foundation V: Explore under Create for the Learner (V.B.1-2) state Learners construct new knowledge by:
1. Problem solving through cycles of design, implementation, and reflection.
2. Persisting through self-directed pursuits by tinkering and making
While the paired ISTE standards:
4. ISTE for Students: Innovative Designer
4b. Students select and use digital tools to plan and manage a design process that considers design constraints and calculated risks.
5. ISTE for Students: Computational Thinker
5c. Students break problems into component parts, extract key information, and develop descriptive models to understand complex systems or facilitate problem solving.
What we see in both is the use of technology, but with the AASL standards, what we have is an encompassing sense of what ‘technology’ is, and is available to our students. (Sorry, what I see when I look at our AASL standards is an applicability that can occur whether we are in a zombie apocalypse or the EMPs have finally gone off and we have no “real” technology versus… ISTE’s version of we’re all in the Matrix and have to learn to deal with this reality.)
Collaborator and Create are, for me, the best descriptor standards for both ISTE and AASL technology standards. The article about being a Future Ready Librarian is one in which I saw the marriage of what were standards common to ISTE and AASL professionals, and watched them expand into what I’ve seen happening in the public library sphere. Create spaces where growing can occur in a safe, supportive environment not only for the teachers, instructors, administrators, and students; but for your greater community. In my experience, a school is like a small-town library. It is important that we reach beyond our walls to bring people (the greater community) inside to grow, learn, and communicate with one another. My job is to take the raw materials of the community (school) I work in, and to fashion the components of the greater community, parents, teachers, instructors, students, and society in classic STEM style into a cohesive unit that can be decimated into understandable parts by my youngest learners. This means I have to use what technology is available to us, and that our rural community has available. One key component in the Future Ready Librarian model is to help build up the infrastructure, and that includes helping to get funding and raise awareness about the lack of sustainability for technology due to outdated wiring (or none at all). (You can’t have the fastest broadband internet with wiring that can barely handle DSL speeds, no? And if you can’t handle the DSL speeds, what good is that brand new software that has to run on the fastest connection possible?)
So we have to take what technology we have to help move our school community forward, but I hazard to say that we are guardians that need to be mindful of the capacity of our communities for sustaining technological change. We must help them manage the information and technology. My work is as an advocate, a supporter, a connector. That is my profession. I nurture relationships so people can grow and become good citizens of our world, and I feel like our purpose is to take these broad ideals being laid out in the ISTE, AASL, and Future Ready Library standards and help bring them forth in a slow and steady method so as to insure greater success of achieving our grand ideals. The Future Ready Librarian fact sheet resembles my own philosophy as a branch manager in the public library sphere (community, community, community… and “real world applications”), and that might be why I can identify with it so well. I feel like our best standard is to be the facilitators who help our students’ transition to the real world with the most versatile skills necessary to successfully navigate the reality of our modern world.
The reality: There are six IT people in my district, and only one member of the school library media department at my school (me). In my school district, I am in charge of my school’s website (content and design). While I will spend time during a professional development day walking teachers through creating their own websites with our new hosting site; the ISTE staff member is working with us during our PLC times to help teachers integrate Google Forms (or even QR codes) for our primary aged classrooms. We had little to be territorial about in regards to training. Also, at my school there is a Technology specialist, and her job is to monitor the students during their time in our computer labs. In the grand scheme, I am the technology maverick: I troubleshoot just about every technological issue that occurs on campus, but I am not trained in the curricular programs my teachers have to use with their students: Ripple Effect, iReady curriculum, Fast Track, etc. I know I desperately need that information if only to understand how I can help facilitate its use.
Honestly, I find myself frustrated by the lack of reality in my current situation, and the standards presented by both ISTE and AASL in regards to the influence of my position as a school media specialist on school technology and curriculum. During my initial two years when new technology was brought into the school (or new software adopted by the district), the only input required of me was: “Please take a look at this. {insert ten second pause} Now please train all staff on how to use it.” If I was lucky I had an hour to prepare for an 7.5 hour PD day. During our current school year, I am now being asked advice on our school technology plan: “what are our needs? Where should we be spending our funds?” For the first time since I transitioned from being a branch manager to a school librarian, I feel that I understand the needs of my teachers because I am finally (mostly) familiar with their varied curriculum’s; and so I can make better informed decisions about the technological and digital needs of our students and staff.
This is where I know teachers making the transition to school library media are at an advantage in regards to being leaders in technology and education. There is already a wealth of knowledge of trends, practices, and curricula built into the classroom teacher who will now transition to a technology professional because it means that this type of school media specialist will understand how to best collaborate and integrate ideas with their teachers in ways that they will find more palatable.
Sources:
American Association of School Librarians. National Standards Crosswalk. Retrieved from https://standards.aasl.org/project/crosswalks/
Future Ready Schools. Unleashing the instructional leadership of librarians to foster schools that are Future Ready. Retrieved from https://futureready.org/program-overview/librarians/