And Buffy, great example of using the standards to support your students–wow!

I do think people just get tired of asking. I also think from the teacher’s vantage point–the IT person is some person in the “sky” so to speak and they don’t necessarily feel empowered to ask them, and many districts have no process for handling complaints either, so no one knows what to do when they hit the roadblocks. (that’s true in our district and it’s often up to the librarians or techs to ask).

I’ve been advocating for a filter committee–just like a book selection committee works to consider books that have been challenged, I think we should have a group that works on filtering issues. I know sometimes the sole IT person may feel beleaguered or like they are responsible if something slips by. When you work with a committee, there is more protection for everyone involved!
So not only are decisions better, but it’s a better safeguard for those making the decisions. I also frankly think these decisions should be in the hands of the curriculum department and NOT the IT department.

I do think this is a battle everyone has gotten very weary of, and in my own school, I find these days I am usually the sole person even trying (along with our tech coordinator).

But I do believe when we make a concerted effort, such as Buffy describes above, it does help convey our interests and purposes. I know we had a great deal of success after several meetings with the tech department and curriculum department at the outset of the web 2.0 tools in convincing them to open the floodgates, by explaining the purpose of sites. And that has subsequently made it much easier to get sites opened up.

One thing I suppose we can hope for (sort of teasing here) is that the more of us and the more students who have iPhones, the more we can hop online and search whatever sites we want!

I do think this needs to be a call to arms for SCASL and for the State Department of Education. It would help mightily if they had a list of items that should MUST be unblocked (such as Edublogs, Wikispaces, PBWorks, Voicethread, etc.) and backed up by the Dept. of Ed. Maybe if they’d adopt the ones on the AASL Top 23 Websites for Teaching and Learning it would be a start.

Just this week, I had to spend some time making a case for a tool I wanted unblocked so that students could access a powerful social bookmarking and sharing tool. I thought it was important enough for my students that I took the time to compose a professional letter of request complete with links of articles the outlined the educational uses of this tool and an explanation of how it was endorsed by AASL on their Top 25 Websites for Teaching and for Learning, which included a great explanation of how the tool was tied to one of the 21st Century Standards for Teaching Learning. I took time to explain how I planned to use it and why it was important to our research project. I even offered to go to the district office and do a demonstration of the tool.

Because of the efforts I made, I fully expect the tool will be unblocked next week. Was it about me? No–these efforts were made to help my students. At the end of the day, we need to remember that our efforts are for our students and providing them equitable access to information.

The era of NCLB has bred an era in K-12 education of fear, conformity, and silence, qualities that have led to a sense of complacency or helplessness. Inquiry and purposeful thought in both teachers and students have been squashed in favor of uniformity and lower level thinking. The focus on testing and grades has marginalized a focus on learning.

We as educators must speak up and take our classrooms and libraries back. For the sake of our students, and I believe our country’s future, we must speak out and create a chorus of resistance to the policies we know are killing education.

Buffy Hamilton
School Library Media Specialist
Creekview High School
Canton, Georgia