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YALSA has sponsored Teen Tech Week(TM) (TTW) as a yearly event since 2007. This initiative was established to encourage and enable teens to be "competent and ethical users of technologies," especially those available through libraries. It highlights librarians as "qualified, trusted professionals in the field of information technology." This year's TTW theme is "Learn, Create, Share @ your library," a theme that speaks to education. School librarians should challenge themselves to find a way to participate.
When I attended my district's back-to-school meetings in August, I mentioned that I was on the TTW committee this year and asked some of the other secondary librarians whether they had ever celebrated TTW. No one had. Some had never even heard of TTW. The ones who had heard of it complained about the unfortunate riming of the week. We teach in a Texas district, and since TTW is in the spring, it, like many other spring activities, falls prey to the strict focus on state testing. In addition to the unfortunate timing of TTW, other librarians complained that the Internet filter blocked all the sites they might want to show to students and that they doubted that administrators would approve of the promotion of any technology that was not directly related to the curriculum.
The difficulty that many school librarians face in promoting TTW is not a new problem. In February 2008, Frances Jacobsen Harris, a former TTW committee member, wrote about the problem in an article for School Library Journal. In "Teen Tech Week, despite limited Access," Harris acknowledged the difficulty that school librarians face because in their libraries, "technology is highly controlled and restricted." The obstacles she identified remain obstacles for most school librarians today. Schools continue to block access to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, to prohibit the use of MP3 devices in the classroom, and to restria the use of blogs and wikis. It is very difficult...