Kathleen W. Craver – författare

School library media centers are at a critical juncture. Over the next decade, schools will undergo fundamental technological, economic, societal, instructional, and administrative changes. Craver discusses the major forces for change confronting school libraries, analyzes their implications as a guide for future decision making, and recommends that school library media specialists assume a leadership role in meeting these challenges. The work provides current data and statistics on future trends in technology, employment, education, society, instruction, and school administration that can help the school library media specialist to formulate forceful arguments for the acquisition of new technologies, instructional reform, and full implementation of resource-based learning. School library media specialists who need to plan and make decisions about the future of their school libraries will find this book an invaluable resource.To visualize the future, Craver creates contrasting scenarios of utopian and dystopian school library media centers in the 21st century. Chapter 1, Technological Trends, discusses the digitalization of all media and the implications of the technological revolution on the school library media center. Chapter 2, Economic Trends, considers the impact of demographic changes and declining budgets and how to deal with them. Chapter 3, Employment Trends, outlines future trends in the workforce and suggests ways in which the school library can respond. Chapter 4, Educational Trends, charts the decline in literacy and the growing school reform movement. Chapter 5, Social and Behavioral Trends, discusses the change from a nation with minorities to a nation of minorities and the transformation of the American family. Chapter 6, Instructional Trends, shows how the instructional role of the school library media specialist will change with the presence of advanced technologies. Chapter 7, Organizational and Managerial Trends, describes the role the school library media specialist will have to assume as the technological, economic, educational, and cultural changes affect the daily business of the media center. Chapter 8, Challenges, focuses on a series of challenges in technology, performance-based programs, collection development, instruction, and organization and manayement of the library media center.

School library media specialists will find this concepts-based approach to teaching electronic literacy an indispensable basic tool for instructing students and teachers. It provides step-by-step instruction on how to find and evaluate needed information from electronic databases and the Internet, how to formulate successful electronic search strategies and retrieve relevant results, and how to interpret and critically analyze search results. The chapters contain a suggested lesson plan and sample assignments for the school library media specialist to use in teaching electronic literacy skills to students and teachers. Dr. Kathleen W. Craver, a nationally recognized specialist in technology in the library media center, identifies the universal concepts of electronic literacy and provides the library media specialist with the rationales, background, methods, and model assignments to teach students and faculty to become proficient and critical users of electronic information technologies.At the beginning of each chapter, Craver furnishes a rationale for change that school library media specialists can use to justify these essential modifications to their teaching curriculum. Chapters include: The Structure of Electronic Information; The Common Vocabulary and Characteristics of Electronic Resources; Formulating Electronic Search Strategies; The Physical Arrangement of Information; Choosing Appropriate On-Site and Remote Electronic Libraries; Choosing Appropriate Electronic Databases; Internet Search Tools and Techniques; Identifying Electronic Resources; On-Site Electronic Records Access; Using Primary Electronic Resources; and Evaluating Electronic Sources. The Appendix contains a list of principal vendors. A glossary of terms and a bibliography of suggested reading complete the work. This basic teaching guide provides the media specialist with all the tools necessary to help novice users to be successful and avoid the frustration of electronic database searching and retrieval.

History teachers and school library media specialists will find this guide a valuable resource for creating technologically advanced, resource-based instructional units in American and World History in grades 7-12. It is filled with 150 recommended primary source Internet sites about history ranging from ancient civilizations to 1998 and is stocked with exciting, interesting, and challenging questions designed to stimulate students' critical thinking skills. Dr. Craver, who maintains an award-winning interactive Internet database and conducts technology workshops for school library media specialists, provides an indispensable tool to enable students to make the best use of the Internet for the study of history.Each site is accompanied by a summary that describes its contents and usefulness to history teachers and school library media specialists. The questions that follow are designed specifically to stimulate critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills are deemed essential for students if they are to succeed academically and economically in the twenty-first century. An annotated appendix of selected primary source databases includes the Internet addresses for 60 additional primary source sites.

As prices of traditional library materials increase, and space to house them shrinks, savvy school library media specialists are creating cyber libraries, or school libraries on the Internet. These libraries offer students and their parents 24-hour access and are invaluable for providing up-to-date information in a way traditional materials cannot. This guide outlines the steps library media specialists can take to create a cyber library, provide content and policies for use, and maintain it for maximum efficiency.Craver justifies the need for cyber libraries in the 21st century, and how they can help librarians to meet the standards in Information Power (1998). She explains the different types of cyber libraries available, along with their advantages and disadvantages. She discusses how to construct them using portals or by acquiring fee-based cyber libraries, and what policies should be in place to protect both the school and its students. Also included are instructions for establishing remote access to subscription databases, creating cyber reading rooms, and providing instructional services to student users. Once a cyber library is created, it must be maintained and evaluated to keep it useful and current, and this book provides guidelines to do so. Finally, there is a chapter on promoting the cyber library, so the school community is aware of its features and participates in its growth process. No school library should be without this volume!

Major help for those inevitable American History term paper projects has arrived to enrich and stimulate students in challenging and enjoyable ways. Students from high school age to undergraduate will be able to get a jumpstart on assignments with the hundreds of term paper projects and research information offered here in an easy-to-use format. Users can quickly choose from the 100 important events of the nineteenth century, carefully selected to be appealing to students, and delve right in. Each event entry begins with a brief summary to pique interest and then offers original and thought-provoking term paper ideas in both standard and alternative formats that incorporate the latest in electronic media, such as iPod and iMovie. The best in primary and secondary sources for further research are then annotated, followed by vetted, stable Web site suggestions and multimedia resources for further viewing and listening. Librarians and faculty will want to use this as well.Students dread term papers, but with this book, the research experience is transformed and elevated. Term Paper Resource Guide to Nineteenth-Century U.S. History is a superb source to motivate and educate students who have a wide range of interests and talents. The provided topics on events, people, inventions, cultural contributions, wars, and technological advances reflect the country's nineteenth-century character and experience. Some examples of the topics are Barbary Pirate Wars, the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings liaison, Tecumseh and the Prophet, the Santa Fe Trail, Immigration in the 1840s, the Seneca Falls Convention, the Purchase of Alaska, Boss Tweed's Ring, Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and Scott Joplin and Ragtime Music.

By becoming practical futurists, school librarians can help their libraries not only to survive sweeping changes in education but to thrive. This book shows how to spot technological trends and use them to your library's advantage.During this time of rapid modernization of technology and educational reform, this book is a must-read for school librarians tasked with ensuring their libraries meet evolving standards. This title provides the research and organizational techniques and skills they need to gain seats at the table of the three power committees: technology, curricula, and strategic planning.School librarians need to collect and publicize national and local school-based evidence that shows the positive correlations between school librarians and student achievement. Craver notes correlative sources and provides ideas to employ them to ensure that school librarians remain indispensable. In addition, acquiring technological skills and becoming expert at their application are paramount for librarians. Even more important is the need for librarians to assume sole responsibility for designing and integrating information literacy and critical thinking skills throughout the curriculum. Craver analyzes studies that show students' inability to discern fact from fiction, ads from news, and information bias in electronic information sources and recommends six actions that school librarians take to ensure that they become active participants in their future rather than its victims.

History and social sciences educators have been charged with ensuring that our students are quantitatively literate. Being able to integrate research data in the form of graphs, charts, and tables and deconstruct quantitative evidence to address questions and solve problems is no longer the domain of mathematicians. Being quantitatively literate is considered an educational imperative in a data-drenched world that holds so many employment challenges. The internet contains a treasure trove of valid and reliable sources of quantitative data that history and social sciences teachers can easily use to satisfy the quantitative literacy requirements of the National Common Core Standards. This book features 85 interesting and exciting multi-century and multicultural web sites that are accompanied by numerical critical thinking questions and activities. Teachers can pose the questions to their entire class or individually assign them. It also contains lists of best practices and examples for interpreting, visualizing, and displaying quantitative data. History and social sciences educators will find this book an indispensable tool for incorporating numerical literacy skills into their class activities and assignments.