Diversity in the media center

Differentiated Instruction means delivering instruction that maximizes learning for ALL students—regardless of skill level or background. It's based on the fact that in a typical classroom, students vary in their academic abilities, learning styles, personalities, interests, background knowledge and experiences, and levels of motivation for learning. But what we must remember is that the media center is an extension of the classroom and is not exempt from making sure that material and equipment is available for ALL students.
Visually-impaired students need to have special equipment available while in the media center. Large print books should also be a part of the collection.
Listening centers should be accessible in the media center for young readers and struggling readers. Licensures such as Tumble Books are a good idea to purchase.
If a school has a population of Spanish-speaking students, there should be items in the collection in Spanish.
Different computer software packages and licenses should be available to help tie in the technological components of lessons and activities.

Diversity in The Media Center

Many schools today consist of a diverse group of students. Students come from diverse background and have different developmental levels. The Media specialist is responsible for reaching all stakeholders in the school’s population. I have had the privilege to volunteer at many media centers. A couple of schools that I have visited have a section of books that are in Spanish for their Spanish population. I think this is important for those students who may not have develop a strong command of the English language, in addition parents would be able to read with their children. One of the schools I volunteered at had a massive amount of early reader picture books for kindergarten students. During, their library time the students were able to actually pick out books that they could read. I think this is important in helping them develop their reading skills. One media center had a listening station set up for students so they could come to the media center throughout to the day and listen to books on tape. The media specialists that I have worked with try their best to meet the needs of all of the stake holders in the school’s community.

Technology and Diversity in the Media Center

Where I am volunteering, the school is very much diverse, and everyone has access to technology resources. All grade levels, cultural backgrounds, regular education, special needs, and ethnicity groups make use of the media center daily. The media specialists introduces many programs to the students and staff, such as ebooks, Windows Movie Maker, Destiny, Net Tracker, etc. The entire faculty and students takes advantage of the technology programs offered when working on projects or reports or research assignments. All programs are beneficial and are catered to all cultural backgrounds. In Destiny, there are materials for Spanish speaking students on videos, DVD's, and online resources. No one is deprived from anything. It is the media specialist responsibility to serve everybody's needs. There are picture books provide for resource and special needs children. These books are accessible to the disable. The entire collection and online resources in the media center is diverse and it meets the needs of the entire school. This makes everyone happy and; therefore, they continue to visit the media center.

Digital story telling

This was my first time using the digital storytelling software. The software program was very easy to use and I enjoyed retelling a historical story. I research a topic that I really knew little about. I learned a lot through this process. I found my self wanting to find out more information. I’ve even thought of adding additional information once the assignment is finished. For students this would be an excellent resource to use when creating a video of information pertaining to the curriculum. I believe they would retain the information better and would become excited about learning the information. They would also feel a tremendous amount of pride at creating their own video.

I’ve only seen movie maker used at one school that I subbed at. The media specialist created a digital video of her favorite author and was in the process of teaching the students how to make their own video. She had already found the websites that the students needed to use. The process seemed very intimidating to me because of the individual attention that it took to guide all twenty students in the right direction. She was excellent with the students and very excited to walk them through this process.

What are ebooks and digital storytelling?

As an educator I have never heard of the terms ebooks and digital storytelling until I took this course. During my research and reading from the Library 2.0 and Beyond, I now have a pretty good idea what they are.

Ebooks are online resources. They take up hardly any physical space, the weight is very lite, and it provides very little disk space. For example, The Civil War holds the same amount of space as MP3 format. The majority of ebooks formats are searchable and they can substitute for dictionaries. Also, they can make tables of contents and indexes to be used as hyperlinks freely accessible and commercial. Project Gutenberg is one of the largest and oldest online sources of ebooks. It provides 19,000 public domain works that has been proofread by volunteers. Manybooks.net reformat a huge collection of Gutenberg texts into a e-reader format. Ebooks has a variety of commercial content. Some of them includes Mobipocket, eReader, the Palm eBook Store, and cookbooks. Reference books are available in ebooks for law, medicine, and humanities. Ebooks focus on areas where print materials are lacking.

Digital storytelling is a story told using moving digital images, digital voiceover narrative, and digital music. They are short and sweet usually 3 to 5 minutes long. Digital storytelling is created for people to tell stories about the lives using drama and emotional content. It must include facts established form context and meaning. Library 2.0 and Beyond lists the seven elements of digital storytelling:

• Point (of view)
• Dramatic question
• Emotional content
• The gift of your voice
• The power of the soundtrack
• Economy
• Pacing

Digital stories can/cannot have music; however, the absence of music speaks volumes. With music it produces mood, builds emotion, and tells the story. The story must be economical with approximately 150 words. Digital storytelling helps promotes the technology use of the libraries, educate students, teachers, and the community.

At my school digital storytelling is being used the technology language arts, and government classes. I am not sure about ebooks, but the use of it will be beneficial for the students.

Technology Training

One of the roles of a media specialist is to share his/her technology expertise with teachers that will assist them with classroom instruction. The media specialist must find the best way to offer her services to teachers.
As a new media the first thing I would like to do is get too know the teachers on the team.
Cultivating relationships with teachers will help them to be more open to help and suggestions.
During the weekly staff meetings I would occasionally ask permission to give a brief abstract of a new technology that could assist in the classroom or others services that the media specialist has to offer. In addition, during in-service time I would talk with the administration about teaching a class on technology and information retrieval in the classroom.
Another way that I would help teachers with technology is by setting up a blog. On this blog I would write articles on different types of technology with links to sites that would be helpful. In addition, I would list website that pertain to what is currently being taught according to the curriculum, the websites would change every grading period to align to what is currently being taught.

Professional Development

Professional Development is extremely important. It keeps faculty members abreast of new and innovative ideas to help reach and teach all students. However its only truly effective if the training is properly implemented.

As an aside I just want to share the fact that one neat thing that we’ve had happen at our school this year is the installation of Acti-Boards in some of our classrooms. However only those teachers whose classrooms would be adorned with this technology were scheduled to attend the training for this new piece of technology.

I think staff development should be held by grade level and not the entire school. This decreases the group size and therefore trainers will be able to provide more individualized assistance if needed. As teachers, we get so much “new stuff” thrown at us, we often don’t get the time to digest those new tools and strategies before we are meeting and being professionally developed on something else.

Below are some tips on how I think to conduct effective professional development:

• Small-sized groups no more than a 1:15 trainer to trainees ratio (especially for training that involves many steps.
• Hands-on training; trainees are actually “doing"
• Topics are relevant and useful to everyday teaching and learning
• Opportunities to ask questions and time is permitted to have questions answered
• Valid methods to provide and receive feedback