William M. Ferriter

This team of teacher technologists do the reader a favor by selecting just five techniques for using technology to impact learning and then cover their recommendations with enough ideas, examples, and forms to help the reader implement the idea with real kids in real classrooms. The main ideas are: managing information in the 21st century, writing open letters to world leaders, telling powerful visual stories, studying challenging topics together, and collaborating to solve problems. While writing letters to world leaders is their least affective strategy, the rest of the ideas speak loudly, very loudly, for a collaboration between teacher librarians and classroom teachers. They are our cup of tea and our expertise. But, don’t get your hopes up. They are part of a trend I have been noticing that educators and technologists are now appropriating teacher librarian’s topics but ignoring the expertise from which these ideas emanate. Alyson’s Zmuda’s challenge to us to claim our expertise screams loudly as one reads these chapters. But, we are not there. So what? The authors have some very good advice for building collaborative intelligence and discovering authoritative information, and working with sound tech tools that really support both deep understanding of topics and of learning how to learn. We applaud them for their ideas and think that teacher librarians would benefit from ideas in addition to those we already regularly profess. Sometimes our urge is to introduce a wide variety of tools when perhaps just zeroing in on a few and pushing hard on the results is a better plan. That is why, the bottom line for this one is to take advantage of the ideas we have not paid quite as much attention to, and push our own strengths as we as teacher librarians move toward that center of teaching and learning. We will take any great ideas we can find from any source.… (més)