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| Image Source: TeachingBooks.net website |
Remember the pandemic? One of the many stressors of that time was the sudden switch to remote teaching and learning. According to the International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE) 2023 blog post, "Trends in Educational Technology," the switch to remote learning exposed the inequalities between richer schools with access to the latest teaching tools and the training to implement them, and poorer schools where both the teacher's technology, along with the students' home situations, often led to a rocky switch to distance learning. The 2020 murder of George Floyd further exposed the need for educators to acknowledge and combat inequalities and racism in America. For school librarians, that has meant a commitment to making the library's collection more welcoming to all and more willing to raise tough topics, as argued by Bogan in "Developing a Library that's Really for Everyone (202l)". One tool that supports ISTE's trend toward developing diverse, equitable, and inclusive educational technologies is TeachingBooks.net.
How does a rather straight-forward database like TeachingBooks.net promote a more diverse library? I consider this question, and provide more guidance on why and how to use this tool, in the following video:
Teachingbooks.net supports ISTE's hot topic #8: Equity and Inclusion in Educational Technology. Teachers and students can use this site to search for books across a range of fields such as: race, ethnicity and country of origin of authors and/or characters; immigration status, neuro-diversity, parental incarceration, LGBTQIA+ families, and other areas of interest. Resources can also be filtered by reading level, genre, language, and award winners like the Coretta Scott King award:
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| Image Source: TeachingBooks.net |
Moreover, Teachingbooks.net has analytical tools that allow school librarians to link their collections to the website which will evaluate them to see whether they are up to date and diverse. Any gaps that might exist are addressed through lists of suggestions. Since I work in a school library whose books came overwhelmingly through second hand donations, our collection is both too old and too uniform to be appealing to our student body. We are working hard to change this, and the analytical tools in Teachingbooks.net could help.
However, this brings up the key weakness of this technology: it is costly. There are temporary free memberships and more reasonable personal memberships. These do not give access to the full potential of TeachingBooks.net. Most disappointingly, the feature that evaluates a library's collection requires a School or District membership which are over $600. We are advocating with our school and foundation boards to get this cost included in the library's annual budget.
On balance, TeachingBooks.net is a good tool for teacher librarians and their students to get access to a comprehensive group of resources. Students can watch book previews and author interviews. They can play games associated with certain books and get homework help. Teachers and librarians can access lesson plans about special topics or particular books. And all can filter their searches to find the latest or classic books that reflect the wonderful multiplicity of the world's people.
AASL announces 2024 Best Digital Tools for Teaching & Learning. ALA. (2024, August 19). https://www.ala.org/news/2024/05/aasl-announces-2024-best-digital-tools-teaching-learning
Bennett, M. (2023, May 26). Culturally diverse collections. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2023/06/01/culturally-diverse-collections/
Bogan, K. (2022, August 28). Developing a library that’s really for everyone. Don’t Shush Me! https://dontyoushushme.com/2021/03/02/__trashed/
Edtech’s hottest topics for 2023. ISTE. (n.d.). https://iste.org/blog/edtechs-hottest-topics-for-2023
An engaging collection of resources that brings books to life. TeachingBooks. (n.d.). https://www.teachingbooks.net/
Mouhanna, A. (2022, January 21). Teachingbooks named a 2021 common sense selection for learning. OverDrive. https://company.overdrive.com/2022/01/21/teachingbooks-named-a-2021-common-sense-selection-for-learning/
Teachingbooks.net review for teachers. Common Sense Education. (n.d.). https://www.commonsense.org/education/reviews/teachingbooksnet
YouTube. (n.d.). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyKHFNyUxuM
Hi Maria! Thank you for sharing this wonderful resercourse with us. Your video was abolsutley wonderful and it was clear to follow. Despite the the costly subscription to TeachingBooks, I hope that to bring up this resource to the administration at the district I teach in and see if they are able to review the app and add into our list of approved resources. I really value that you reflected on the equity and inclusion parts of the resource- as a teacher, our students come from numerous different backgrounds and bring a variety of experiences into the classroom (even ones that we may not have had).
ReplyDeleteIt's important to be able to have a resource that recognizes these experiences and to even use it for ourselves (teachers) to learn more about our students. Thank you for sharing!