Journal #6 Professional Reading

After skimming some blog posts on book reviews and primary grade-level topics, I found an entry that caught my eye has a high school teacher.  This one comes from the School Library Journal blog feed. 

Summary
This post entitled "STEM Video Game Challenge Encourages Librarians to Mentor Students" by Lauren Barack was on the SLJ blog called The Digital Shift and was informative and encouraging. Barack reports that for the third year E-Line Media and the Sesame Workshop sponsored the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which awards prizes to middle and high school students who create video games that promote "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)".  This is the first year, though, that librarians were specifically called upon to mentor students via the Challenge's new partnership with the
 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).  The organizers of the challenge see librarians as mentors in learning, and libraries as centers for investigation and discovery, matching perfectly with the aims of the competition.  The article notes previous years' winners, reasons why librarians are valued as mentors, and the potential prizes for winners.

Resource
What better professional reading for a future librarian could there be, besides the School Library Journal blog?  There are many other blogs and resources out there, but SLJ is pretty comprehensive and credible, and I had built up several week's worth of unread entries (which is over 100!).  The list of unread posts on my Google Reader feed was pretty easy to skim to select a few that seemed interesting and applicable.  Most of them were about book reviews by genre, which was a helpful way of organizing entries.  One thing I did not care for was, as I've noticed before, the format of the entries themselves is lacking when viewed through Google Reader, rather than the blog itself.  With this particular post, there were not as many hyperlinks, which surprised me.  But that's an easy fix since I can visit The Digital Shift by clicking on the title of the article once I have it open from the RSS feed.  Another benefit of going straight to the source is that I got a list of suggestions of related articles to read.  One that I really enjoyed was about alternatives to using google, which I posted for everyone in the general discussion forum.  This added content is just one reason why I prefer to read the SLJ blogs rather than subscribe to the magazine, not to mention that it's free!

Content
I found this article very encouraging because it recognized the vital role that school librarians play-- and the people recognizing that vital role, were not just librarians themselves!  The initiative to include librarians in the STEM video game competition seems to have come from the challenge's original sponsors who saught out the help of the IMLS.  These sponsors have some clout in innovative education already, so the fact that they highlighted how important library services are should provide some good PR for librarians, which we need in today's world of budget cuts and the "I'll-just-google-it" attitude.  The article also made it easy for people to get involved, providing a link to the Mentor Resource Kit, which parents, students, teachers, and any adult wanting to be a teacher can find helpful.  The kit provides important dates and multimedia tools to help explain how the process works.  There are even workshops to attend.  Unfortunately, the only "real life" workshops I saw were no where near Illinois.  But I don't think that excludes midwesterners from participating as the online tools should be enough to get kids going.  I would love to see libraries in Illinois taking advantage of this competion. 

I guess it's easy for me to say that librarians should try this since I'm not a librarian myself yet.  If I imagine myself in that situation, I would feel like this could be a scary, daunting task.  My background is in English, afterall, not science!  What if I mess up?  But I think this is one of those times where I have to remember that it's better to try and fail than not to try. Not only would it be great inquiry-based learning with a high engagement factor ("Common Core" anyone?), but what a fabulous way for librarians to further build relationships with students and mark the library as an essential component to all kinds of learning!