Yep, between the end of the year & baseball...I'm surprised I am even finding time to sleep! But it is a glorious Memorial Day with NOTHING on the agenda--yippee!
I was just catching up on my TWITTER feeds and stumbled upon an article about a private high school in Massachusetts that has decided to all but entirely eliminated their media center. I remember hearing about this last fall. This is an update and the principal is raving about the success--the media is now a gathering area for faculty & students full of digital resources. That's wonderful--but I'm just wondering why it is necessary to do this entirely void of books (in the physical form)? I view it as a form of censorship.
Don't get me wrong. I am a strong proponent of ebooks replacing textbooks--save money, trees & a lot of students' backs, not to mention real-time information. And I spend a good deal of my time researching online, as do my students. But books complement their research--I would hate to say, "Nope, sorry, you MUST find everything online."
The most frightening conclusion that too many administrators might be making is the idea that if books are becoming obsolete, then so are media specialists. Yet when I entered this program 2 years ago, I was struck by how what we do in the media is more applicable to real life than much of what is occurring in classrooms, particularly with the inane focus on test scores these days. Our students are getting more & more of their information from the web, and it is our job to teach them to evaluate, synthesize & use that information wisely. (not currently on our tests...) THAT is preparing students for REAL life--so how valuable are we?
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