How can eLibrary be the best curriculum solution for your teachers?

April is School Library Media Month. If librarians really want to increase student use of eLibrary, then they need to be able to demonstrate to teachers that its content and tools benefit both teachers and students. They need to show that students and teachers can't get these benefits anywhere else.

This is especially important when the increasing use of Google continues to erode the use of librarian-provided resources and librarian expertise in information literacy. Unfortunately, many students and teachers are by-passing the library's educator-selected learning resources for the "free" and increasingly popular world of Internet surfing.

Librarians need to be able to demonstrate the benefits of eLibrary to teachers (guide) first because teachers make the assignments and ultimately guide (or don't guide) students to the best resources for a research topic/issue. Why should teachers use eLibrary and also guide their students to use it?

• Lexile and Reading Level Indicators -- Show how each article has a reading difficulty level that can help students and teachers select resources they can understand.
  
  
• BookCart Lesson Planning -- Show how BookCarts can be used to make lesson plans with teacher-selected resources for any inquiry-based activity they assign.
  
  
• ProQuest Model BookCart Collection -- Show how easy it is to copy from 700+ models at all curriculum levels and areas, then adapt these models for students to use. Saves time and gives teachers better control over the research activity.
  
  
• Publications Search to Update Textbooks -- Show how to browse current publications in any curriculum area to find and print articles for class discussion and student notebooks.
  
  
• Professional Library at Home -- Show the list of education magazines and journals that teachers can browse at home for in-service, professional development, or graduate credit work.
  
  
• Standards Search for Teaching Resources -- Show how teachers can find articles and websites correlated to specific state standards in their curriculum area.
  
  
• 100% K-12 Relevant -- Not Just Websites -- Google doesn't provide articles from thousands of K-12 relevant publications. Articles are easier to browse and offer only relevant information, saving valuable research time.
  
  
• Lesson Plan Activities Collection -- Show teachers how they can get lesson plans correlated to popular themes and current events for each school month.

Students need to be able to see why using eLibrary is so much better than using Google. Avoid demonstrating a variety of search strategies. One of the reasons that students use Google is because it doesn't require them to be trained in searching.

Show them the unique content they'll find with eLibrary, content they won't find with Google. Demonstrate how eLibrary saves them time by providing search results that are always credible and relevant.

• MyList -- Students can easily save the links to articles they select, email the links to home, or print a copy of the citation information for teachers to review.
  
  
• Spell Check -- Students don't always know the correct spelling of words they use for searches. eLibrary will suggest other terms when a search term is misspelled.
  
  
• Reference with English-to-Spanish Dictionary -- If students don't understand a word, they can highlight it and click the Reference tab to access dictionary definitions (in Spanish too), a thesaurus, a variety of encyclopedias, and other sources to learn more.
  
  
• Lexile and Reading Level Indicators -- Help students select articles that are written at levels they can read and understand. Help AP and IB students to select more scholarly works.
  
  
• Citation Tool -- One of the most onerous tasks for students becomes easy with the citation tool.

April birthdays of famous people you should know something about!

You can bet that there will be someone in your class or in their family who was born in April. Here is a list of people who have April birthdays. Most are not well-known to your students but have made significant contributions to the world during their lifetime. Some are still alive and continue to contribute to the world today.

April Birthdays

• William Harvey (April 1)
  
• Abraham Maslow (April 1)
  
• Hans Christian Anderson (April 2)
  
• Jane Goodall (April 3)
  
• Maya Angelou (April 4)
  
• Booker T. Washington (April 5)
  
• Colin Powell (April 5)
  
• Kofi Annan (April 8)
  
• Paul Robeson (April 9)
  
• Joseph Pulitzer (April 10)
  
• Commodore Matthew Perry (April 10)
  
• Leonardo da Vinci (April 15)
  
• Wilbur Wright (April 16)
  
• Charlie Chaplin (April 16)
  
• Clarence Darrow (April 18)
  
• John Paul Stevens (April 20)
  
• Elizabeth II (April 21)
  
• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (April 22)
  
• Sergei Prokofiev (April 23)
  
• James Buchanan (April 23)
  
• Meadowlark Lemon (April 25)
  
• Edward R. Murrow (April 25)
  
• John James Audubon (April 26)
  
• Coretta Scott King (April 27)
  
• Ulysses S. Grant (April 27)
  
• Samuel B. Morse (April 27)
  
• Oscar Schindler (April 28)
  
• Zubin Mehta (April 29)

Most K-8 curricula include popular research activities that focus on biographies of famous people. Your students will benefit from both learning about these famous people and telling their classmates about them.

Teachers should assign a different person from the list to each student. Students should create an oral or PowerPoint report of about two minutes that uses at least two resources. It should include a picture of the person, as well as a second picture of something representative of their accomplishments. The report should include answers to at least three of the following essential questions for critical thinking:

• Where, when, and in what kind of family was this person born?
  
  
• What obstacles did this person have to overcome to achieve his/her goals?
  
  
• What do you think was this person's greatest accomplishment and why?
  
  
• Are there any events or deeds that this person might regret and why?
  
  
• How do this person's accomplishments benefit us today?
  
  
• Is there anything about this person's life that inspires you?

Students should use the name of the person assigned to them to do a key word search.

Students can create a written report (model) or PowerPoint presentation (model 1 or 2.)

eLibrary Support for Professional Development

eLibrary supports educator professional development in two distinct ways:

1. Access to a free professional library: Browse more than 100 education magazines and journals, as well as a variety of magazines that provide the latest news and developments in the worlds of science, literature, history, geography, mathematics, etc. Print articles to update and supplement your textbook in the classroom.
   
   
2. More than 30 ProQuest model BookCarts: Librarians can copy these BookCarts for teachers to use and learn from (yes, BookCarts can benefit teachers too!) BookCarts address many of the hot topics in schools today: Differentiating Instruction, Classroom Discipline, and 21st Century Literacy and Skills as examples. (See the Special Collections tab.)

Download the following resources to get listings of the free professional library and tips on publication browsing:

Professional Library Publications to Browse

Professional Development BookCarts (See Special Collections worksheet)

Each of these librarians had a BookCart vision for increasing librarian-teacher collaboration. Their stories (read here) will provide motivation and strategies for other librarians who subscribe to any of the eLibrary family of learning resources and want to get started on building their own collections of 21st Century resources for learning through inquiry-based activities:

Ana Banos
Sweetwater Union High School District, San Diego, CA

Ann Martha
Philadelphia School District, PA

Diane Gallagher Hayashi
Stelly School, Saanich SD, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Elizabeth Golden + Johanna Lawler
Greater Essex County SB, Ontario, Canada

Carolyn Hoye
Coyle & Cassidy HS, Taunton, MA

All Stories: Read here!