Helping teachers use online resources for science?

Hello all,

I'm working to help elementary librarians use online resources for science, and help bring those resources to the teachers in their schools. I'm trying to find out the best ways to bring some of this content to librarians, and figure out how these online resources might fit into their regular workday. From what I understand, the amount of teacher/librarian collaboration greatly depends on the culture of the particular school -- and it seems that this collaboration would be very important in order for a librarian to know -- for example -- what science unit was being covered in a classroom so that they could recommend a particular website or online game that would be relevant for that unit. I'm not sure how librarians would, practically, bring all these valuable online resources for science to teachers in their school.

Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Feel free to contact me directly too, at stephaniechasteen@yahoo.com. This is a project that I'm working on with the National Science Digital Library (NSDL.org).

Thanks in advance for any help or advice,
Stephanie

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Keith Schoch on February 19, 2011 at 10:15am

Wow... Not an easy answer to this one. I did check out your site and it's full of great resources. As you mentioned yourself, it's really up to the librarian/media specialist to find out what the teachers are studying, and then to provide resources. For whatever reason, teachers tend to "forget" that the librarian is there as a resource person not just for students, but for teachers as well.

In one school where I taught, teachers were required to submit units of study to the school librarian so that she could assist them in finding resources. Sounds onerous for thee teachers, but it wasn't, since you only needed to submit topic names (maybe 4 to 6 for Science, 7 to 8 for Social Studies, and so on). The librarian then met with teams during their planning periods to clarify topics, and begin offering resources. A class studying polar biomes, for example, would love to know about Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears. Totally win-win.

I think a way to make your site more user-friendly is to try categorizing by topic and theme, along with science discipline and grade level. A teacher Google searching for ideas will more likely find a site whose "architecture" is designed in terms of the topics being sought via search engines, rather than in terms of strict scientific disciplines.

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