These practical and useful lesson plans promote teaching information and computer skills as an integral part of the middle school curriculum. Emphasizing the vital role shared by media specialists, teachers, and administrators in connecting students to the Information Superhighway, this new edition contains current goals, terminology, learning strategies, and resources that encompass the Information Age.

Provides a history and overview of the certification process, reviews the areas highlighted in the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) portfolio entries and assessment center exercises, examines their components, and gives tips on how to complete each part.

Everhart provides practical guidelines and ready-to-use forms for evaluating a school library media center, as well as important results derived in other studies. She includes qualitative and quantitative techniques for the areas of curriculum, personnel, facilities, collections, usage, and technology. She also gives step-by-step instructions on how to create in-house surveys, conduct interviews, and use observation to gather useful data. Conduct research, collect statistics, and evaluate your program with this useful resource. Everhart provides practical guidelines and ready-to-use forms for evaluating a school library media center, as well as important results derived in other studies. She includes qualitative and quantitative techniques for the areas of curriculum, personnel, facilities, collections, usage, and technology. She also gives step-by-step instructions on how to create in-house surveys, conduct interviews, and use observation to gather useful data. For example, there are directions on how to assess information literacy with rubrics. In addition, each chapter gives detailed references, a list of further readings, applicable Web sites, and dissertations. A quick and easy guide to justifying and supporting your SLMC operations and effectiveness, this book is invaluable to all school library media specialists. It will also be of interest to school library media supervisors and researchers.

School library media specialists are now considered part of the teaching staff and are charged with integrating their library and information skills curriculum with the more general classroom curriculum. At the same time more and more special needs students are part of every school and every classroom. Thus, the media specialist must work effectively with special needs students on a regular basis to develop their information skills, and must also serve as a resource to classroom teachers. This professional reference offers practical information to school library media specialists on how to serve special needs students and their classroom teachers effectively. The first part of the book highlights the teaching role of the media specialist and discusses how and what to teach special needs students. The second part views the media specialist as an information expert who must structure the library and its resources for students with special needs. The third section treats the media specialist's role as a professional who must collaborate with other teachers.