S.O.S. Educators’ Spotlight

Ruth Small posted an intriguing note on LM_NET Thursday that caught my attention immediately. I blogged before on "Incidental Curiosity" and am always asking questions of children and teens about their habits. Ruth wrote:

Do you ever wonder what kinds of questions your students ask just because they’re curious?

Have you been looking for motivating teaching strategies to use with at-risk students?

Want to create a wiki but don’t know where to start?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you will want to read the Spring/Summer 2007 edition of "Educators’ Spotlight Digest," the free, online magazine that puts the spotlight on you, the library media specialist.

In this issue, Dr. Joanne Silverstein describes her fascinating research on the kinds of questions kids ask online, some preservice librarians from New York City describe some winning strategies they have used to motivate students with a fear of failure, and Lyn Spencer describes how she went from wiki woes to wiki wows while collaborating with the fourth grade teacher team.

Just go to http://www.sosspotlight.org/ to read this and much more…

So I went to the sosspotlight.org website and was bowled over by that particular article. Dr. Silverstein, I am impressed. I have also been very impressed with Ruth Small and the S.O.S. project, so I asked Ruth to give us more information.

Educators’ Spotlight Digest, created in 2006 and edited by Marilyn Arnone, is a free, online magazine targeting educators in K-12 and higher education who teach information literacy skills to students. ESD is part of the S.O.S. for Information Literacy project (funded by IMLS) and intended to showcase practitioners’ motivating teaching ideas and lessons taken directly from the S.O.S. database. One wonderful side effect has been that people now are sending in articles voluntarily about their experiences (e.g., Lyn Spencer’s article on wikis in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue) and we’re then turning their ideas into new

submissions to S.O.S.

ESD has a number of regular columns such as Teaching Tips, a Guest Writer column, and the College Connection, as well as two columns related to the resources of our two professional organization partners, AASL and ACRL. My very favorite article, to date, was one that appeared in the Winter 2007 issue about two people who met while they were in our school media program at Syracuse, fell in love, and were married. They are now both in their own school libraries and they talk about how they

share ideas and help one another. It was a very sweet article; I loved it!

So here is your webwork today – 3 tasks. Subscribe to LM_NET if you haven’t already because you are limiting yourself professionally. Go to sosspotlight.org and see what you have been missing. Contribute via comments to this blog and others so you are part of the conversation.

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