Assignment 4: Key Assessment - Phase 1
Needs Assessment
Seth Cox
Univ. of West Georgia
MEDT 7490 Visual & Media Lit Tch & Learn
Dr. Adriana D’Alba
October 9, 2022
Assignment 4: Key Assessment - Phase 1: Needs Assessment
LMS Media Center
The Loganville Middle School Media Center serves as the main hub for the network of learning for the school. More than a resource for books, the media center is often the site of joint tech-driven labs and research. The media center is located at the front of the school. When you enter the media center, there are several rows of books that are organized on shoulder-high bookshelves and are organized by fiction and nonfiction texts using the Dewey Decimal System. There are approximately 17,000 books housed here with 46% of those being non-fiction books. Students use an online service to browse inventory, place holds on books and check out ebooks as well. Top the left side of the media center, there is a conference room, book storage room and chromebook repair office. The media center distributes a Chromebook to every student (1400ish) in the school as well as does repairs. The media specialist’s and the paraprofessional’s office is located behind the checkout counter, in the back center of the media center. There is also a small workroom in the back right, that includes a laminating machine and teacher resources such as construction paper and butcher paper. To the right of the media center, there is a row of desktop computers, which serves as a miniature computer lab for class and/or teacher use. There is a short wall that divides the computers and on the other side is a large flat screen smart board with a variation in seating. In this area, a class can be hosted for media activities such as virtual reality lessons, technology integration, literacy lessons and much more. Classes may visit the media center as a whole group for class checkouts, group projects and other lessons. During school hours, students may also visit the media center independently with their teacher's approval. Students may check out up to two books for a length of two weeks. Students may use the media center computers for educational purposes only and this includes the option to print their assignments. The Loganville Middle School Media Center’s mission is to “strive to ensure accessibility and opportunity for our learners.”
School Supported Programs
There are a multitude of online resources that enhances learning in the classroom that the school offers and are all filtered and monitored through the media center. As mentioned before, students (and teachers) have access to Destiny Discover, which is the online platform used for the media center. Students can access the media center’s in house inventory as well as eBooks, audiobooks and interactive books. Another resource is Galileo. Galileo is an online library portal which requires a subscription. The Walton County school district purchased this subscription for the entire county to use. Galileo provides access to online databases, educational magazines and scholarly journals. LMS uses a program called Schoology to be their online learning management system and is also used by all the schools in the district. This system allows for teachers to create new assignments, uploaded assignments and provides for self paced learning as well as asynchronous learning when students are absent from school. This system also aligns with the grading system that the district uses. Resources can be saved and accessed at a later date as well as shared with teachers.
All students at LMS are able to access the multitude of online resources via an application called Clever. This is the district’s portal that houses links to all their paid (and some unpaid) services that are available to be utilized in class. The following is not a comprehensive list of available resources, but it provides the most used and helpful resources that students use: IXL, BrainPop, Flocabulary, GimKit, Annotations, NearPod, Edmentum Exact Path, No Red Ink, Ready Reading, ReadTheory, Let’s Go Learn, Moby Max, FEV Tutor as well as the Google Suite of programs (docs, gmail, drive, slides, etc.). Out of these, IXL is probably the most widely used by ELA and math teachers as IXL is a learning platform that can be personalized to each individual student’s needs. Teachers rely on this as a remediation tool as well as align the growth data from MAP Testing.
District and State Level Resources
When researching what resources and programs that are available for student support across the Walton County School District, in which Loganville Middle School is a part of, it was found that most, if not all, resources provided at LMS are also provided at the other schools in the district. As mentioned before, the online learning management system that LMS uses is the same system that the district used: Schoology. This system was being slowly pushed into daily lessons prior to the Covid-19 Pandemic but was quickly pushed to being an everyday tool during and after the pandemic was over. The other learning resources and programs that are used by the entire district are IXL, No Red Ink, BrainPop and Flocabulary. As far as pulling the scope back and looking at state level programs and resources, the state offers access to the online database, GALILEO; which is also accessible through the media center at LMS. The O’Kelly Memorial Library is the library located in Loganville and is accessible in person and online to residents of Loganville, which should encompass most of the students that attend LMS. They provide resources for students such as eBooks, tutoring, homework help and physical check outs with no overdue fines. The other resources offered by the library include: Free public computer access, Free WiFi, Quiet Study Room, Large Meeting Room, Children’s Area, Assistive Technology, AWE Early Literacy Station Computers – Ages 2-8, Wireless Printing, Color Printing, Copying, Scanning, Faxing, Proctoring, Regular & Large Print Materials, Digital Resources, Heritage Genealogy Room, Free Programs & Events and Master Gardener Free Seed Bank. The digital resources include: GALILEO, eRead Kids, LearningExpress Library, Digital Library of Georiga and Words2Reading.
Findings from Interviews
After interviewing the media center specialist and two classroom teachers at LMS, I was able to find out some great things about what the media center has to offer as well as some short comings, which I believe can be amended easily. The media center specialist spoke in detail about a couple of issues when asked about recommendations for improvement. The first area is improvement was about the state of Georgia’s new policy stating that classroom literacy must be
on grade level lexile levels. This means that all articles, novels, etc. must be within the grade
level’s Lexile range. He was not concerned with the amount of digital resources that
students and teachers have access to. He stated that the district is doing a great job providing a
wide variety of engaging and rigorous resources to students and teachers. The next area of improvement that the media center specialist commented on was the lack of time that he gets with the students. As it stands, classes come to the media center on a two week rotation and only spend 20 minutes at a time. He stated that in this 20 minutes, most of the that time is spent for the students to return books, browse inventory, and check out new books. He would like more time to be built into the schedule so that he can plan literacy activities and other engaging learning activities.
Similarly to the interview with the media center specialist, the interviews with the two classroom teachers yielded areas of wanted improvement as well. The teachers interviewed were an 8th grade social studies (SS) teacher and an 8th grade english language arts teacher (ELA). The ELA teacher mentioned the state of Georgia’s Lexile policy, same as the media center speccialist. She stated that she struggles with her limited ability to remediate in her Language Arts remediation classes. The clinch on Lexile levels limits her ability to work with her students decoding and vocabulary skills. She is afraid that the lower level students abilities with vocabulary leads to lower Lexile levels due to the inability to learn vocabulary and being able to read what vocabulary they learn in books. She stated this is not an area of improvement directly for the media center but the two are related. The SS teacher mentioned the same thing as the ELA teacher in regards to the state’s clinch on Lexile levels. These two teachers teacher on the same “pod” and see the same similar group of students. She pushes reading in her class hard, to help expose the students to reading as much as possible in hopes to increase their Lexile’s and reading abilities before heading to high school. She told me that she has used a book for years but it has a Lexile that is out of the 8th grade range, and is no longer able to use it due to the state’s new policy. While there is a variety of problems that could be fixed, there is one glaring issue that must be resolved. This issue is a missing list of novels and articles for each content area that fits within the appropriate Lexile band and content or topic.
Media Center Specialist - Seth Brown: seth.brown@walton.k12.ga.us
References
Loganville Middle School Media Center. Date Accessed: October 7, 2022.
https://www.walton.k12.ga.us/LMSMediaCenter.aspx
O’Kelly Memorial Library. Date Accessed: October 3, 2022.
https://azalealibraries.org/okelly-memorial-library/