Technology Projects

Working in a 1:1 school, finding the right technology project is strangely daunting.

I was not expecting to feel so very flustered at the prospect of finding a technology-related project. As a 1:1 school, I have joked (earnestly, so maybe it wasn't really joking) to many people that chromebooks are my life. Now in our third week of school, we have transitioned from the frantic "MUST-GET-CHROMEBOOKS-IN-THE-HANDS-OF-EVERY-STUDENT" stage to fielding emails from teachers and students desperately needing us to fix beginning-of-the-year glitches. Getting technology into our students' hands is not a problem.

However, this school year, we don't even have the funds in our school budget to replace our defunct laminator, so anything that requires spending school money (outside of our county-wide chromebook grant) is perhaps a bit out of reach.

Just Friday, I had a few teachers e-mail me with the following problems:
1. Students don't have chromebooks, because they have broken one in the past and are afraid to get a new one lest they break it and have to pay for it.
2. Students have chromebooks, but the batteries die two-thirds of the way through the day, and they have nothing to work with during fourth period. Charging is difficult, because students a.) forgot their chargers or b.) it is difficult to charge in classrooms and still stay within fire code.
3. Students have no idea how to handle online research. I can speak to them as a class, but students don't think of the library as a place to get information on what's online; they think, "Why traipse all the way down to the library if I can just Google Ancient Rome?"

Here were the solutions I came up with. I feel like only one of them actually serves as a viable project option.
1. Allow students the option of "day use--" meaning they can check out a chromebook for the day, but can't take it home.
2. Investigate creating charging stations in the library, throughout the commons, and perhaps even in the cafeteria.
3. Using a wiki and Google forms, create a "research aide service," run, managed, and maintained by student media assistants (we have at least three in every class period). The purpose of this research aide service would be for students to find internet sources on their research topic, submit those sources (through a Google form), and have them evaluated for validity by student media assistants, who then post the tenable websites on the wiki, arranged by Dewey number/subject. Student media assistants would also suggest print items from our collection to supplement the online research students are doing.

Last year, I tried a website-evaluation lesson using QR codes: student media assistants had to choose a Dewey section (in which they were specifically interested), find and vet ten websites on that subject, and post them to a Google site with a corresponding QR code over that Dewey section on the shelves. Here was the problem: in my naive utopian vision, students would be coming to the library armed with their smartphones, leaving with piles of books and tons of bookmarked links for their senior project essays or their World History research papers. That, however, didn't really happen. If, when the library specifically works with a class, the teacher and I could require students (or at least strongly suggest) to take advantage of this service, I might be able to impact a greater audience. In doing so, student media assistants would be leaving my class as tech-savvy reference-librarians-in-training, and students in other classes will have learned that the library is a helpful place when it comes to research, not a daunting one.

Hopefully, anyway.