District Literacy Committee Meeting & SHS LMSs use of TRAILS

After the Elementary District Literacy Committee meeting today I reflected on three things:

1.) I heard from reading teachers at the meeting that elementary students have a more difficult time summarizing material from a nonfiction text than a fiction text. Library media specialists are in a good position to help with the improvement of students' abilities in that area, since much of research deals with summarizing information taken from nonfiction sources.

2.) Ahhh! To have the data! Data-driven instruction based on DRA scores and a variety of other assessments leads to the creation of instructional strategies and differentiated instruction to improve reading and writing skills. As media specialists and technology teachers we need to create/use more assessments that provides data to guide instruction.

3.)....and speaking of DATA -- at this morning's meeting with Julia Roberts and Robin Stiles, LMSs at SHS, Natalie Carrignan, director of instructional technology, and I viewed the recent data collected from an online assessment they gave to 5 English classes. This was a trial run of an online Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (TRAILS -- http://www.trails-9.org/ ) which Robin and Julia will have all 9th graders take during an orientation session at the beginning of next year. The resulting data will be used to determine what areas of instruction might be needed for whole group instruction or for the creation of short video tutorials that will be created for individual viewing by students on specialized topics (such as intellectual property or boolean operators!)