Digital Shift Acceleration

Come fall - schools are expected to provide staggered classrooms and a whole new way of connecting to students and their families. Before COVID-19, many classroom teachers connected with the parents of their kids through cell phone interactions, texts and Class Dojo.

All of these tools will go into hyper-drive this fall. K-8 students are expected to attend semi-regular classrooms, but 9th-12th graders will be expected to work from home using digital content and following through on assignments on their own. Ohio schools have an advantage through the Open Educational Resources (OER) OER content site INFOhio.org. Teachers are encouraged to share this resource, but often don't know much about it themselves. Compounding the confusion - some teachers use Google to platform their classes. Others use Microsoft Edu.

There is a need to help students get on the same page and also to provide a print access safety net to students in homes where digital access is limited or non-existent. Libraries have filled this void. There is a great opportunity for the Clevnet libraries and the school districts served by these communities to provide a secondary catalog access to the media available through INFOhio and the media at Clevnet libraries - using the My Library feature at INFOhio:

Students would still log into the site using their district authentication - but would also be able to order materials from the Clevnet libraries.

Librarians could help teachers curate materials and lesson plans and help students access content after school and on weekends using INFOhio Educator Tools and Open Space:

How it works: Educators partner with public library staff to present curated curriculum at the INFOhio Open Space. The INFOhio Open Space is a joint project among INFOhio, Ohio content providers, and Ohio PreK-12 schools to provide a platform for collaboration and the development of OER -Open Educational Resources. At Open Space, Educators and their public library support staff create working groups for sharing content.

Licensed and supported by INFOhio, Open Space was built on the OER Commons infrastructure and features all the authoring and collaboration tools found on OER Commons, ISKME's digital library and collaboration platform. While hosted and indexed on the OER Commons platform, Open Space has been designed to meet the unique needs of Ohio's PreK-12 educators.

There are kinks to work out - but it is definitely worth exploring a partnership that puts kids on top.