The Media Specialist: A Teacher’s best Friend

Blake Turner

Technology is here and it is here to stay.  It has become an integral part of the educational system.  Grades are kept on databases, streaming video is used in lessons, and student scheduling is performed, all on electronic formats; class projects have moved from the age-old piece of poster board and the realm of dioramas to the electronic arena.  I would imagine that most educators would be hard pressed to imagine a school day going by without utilizing a piece of technology in some fashion or another. 

It seems that most schools do not necessarily suffer from a lack of technology, but rather a competence in its use and support.  As many of us have experienced, receiving a new piece of equipment can be a blessing and a curse.  The excitement of having a new tool to use in the education of our students is obvious; however, sometimes the daunting task of learning how to use the new piece of wonder technology is paralyzing.   Teachers have barely enough time to teach, plan, and grade; facing the task of learning a new electronic format can be a bit hard  It seems although there is more and more technology entering schools, the irony prevails that there is little training that accompanies it.

I have also noticed that technology specialist at schools have little time to give lessons on using technology; in fact I have observed that quite a bit of their time is employed with hardware issues and attending to basic computer issues.

It struck me that these observances offer an excellent opportunity for the astute media specialist.  In essence, a motivated media specialist could help solve the issue of technology training and address the issue of the plethora of trivial issues that the resident technology specialist deals with, thus, freeing him or her to help with more instruction based assistance.

As we all know, it is our job as media specialists to make the breadth of the services that we offer and the wonderful resource that a media center represents apparent to all of our peers.  Becoming a learning leader in the arena of technology assistance is one such way to make our positive impacts on education felt. 

            The first step to providing any form of meaningful assistance or education is to find out the level of knowledge from the intended audience.  This can be easily accomplished be sending out e-mails that request feedback.  These can be done in simple response e-mails that request areas of interest or needs from the staff.  An excellent resource for tailored response style survey e-mails is doodle.com; check it out and you will be amazed!

As great as e-mails are, do not be afraid to hit the rubber to the road and go drop in on a few teachers and meet with them face to face with them.  Of course, make sure that it is convenient for them, but I have found that often times the plethora of e-mails that teachers receive on a daily basis induces many to delete them… importance be damned... without much consideration.  I can understand this myself.  It is amazing what meeting personally with an individual can do towards opening future lines of communication.  You will also open a chance to address some timely needs that the teacher may be facing with his or her classes.

The next step is for the media specialist to come up with some in-service seminars and or training modules to help faculty members in their technological challenges.  Remember, that quite a bit of training can be provided to teachers in the forms of interactive PowerPoints.  In fact, many of the questions that plague technology specialist like: how do you scan a document, turn a document into a PDF, access school calendars, utilize grading software, etc. can be addressed in simple how to documents that can be sent to teachers through a school efficiently.

I also feel that in person seminars should be sweetened with the promise of in service or PLU hours.  In fact, I would imagine that any type of training in technology could be tied to just about any school’s school wide improvement plan.  These seminars could also be tied to technology standards that most states have, thus bridging the impact on student achievement divide that media specialist are often challenge to overcome.