iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

In 2018, the littleBits Education team collaborated with School Library Journal to better understand the changing nature of school libraries – often from monolithic reading rooms to innovation hubs.

The resulting data helped us to delve more deeply into the types of programs that are offered as part of maker and STEAM education, the challenges librarians face as they start and scale these programs, and some of the best practices to ensure an effective and engaging implementation for all students.



Importantly, we learned that the majority of the respondents in our sample (92 percent) mentioned that librarians were responsible for organizing maker activities in their schools. In one-fifth of schools, it is the classroom teacher who organizes maker activities. And students, themselves, organize maker activities in 10 percent of schools.

Librarians do an amazing job at school. They are entrusted with various educational tasks. These include, according to Queen University library, help students with information-related activities, assist students in developing information literacy skills that allows them to navigate and search the web effectively, collaborate with teachers in creating challenging project-based activities, run different literacy clubs, build library collections and many more. In today’s post we are sharing with you this handy visual we published last year featuring a number of interesting web tools to help teacher librarians in their work.

Whether they are doing storytime, teaching classes about social media privacy, or discovering new books to add to their collections, librarians always work overtime — and wear many different hats — to bring the magic that they do day in and day out to their communities. In short, librarians rock. Here is just a handful of reasons how and why: