By Ruth V. Small
Director, Project ENABLE
With great excitement, we announce the launch of the Project ENABLE (Expanding Nondiscriminatory Access By Librarians Everywhere) training website, made possible by Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This comprehensive site provides information and training for developing effective library and information services for pre-K-12 students with disabilities.
While the site's target audience is school librarians, we believe it is also a valuable resource for public and academic librarians, general and special educators, administrators, parents, and communities. The site contains five self-paced learning modules, jam-packed with useful information in a variety of formats (text, still and moving images, graphics, audio over PowerPoint, and more). You will find information to read, videos to view, games to play, learning exercises to challenge you, and quizzes to assess your learning. You can take notes along the way and save them to your profile. The site also has the option of allowing you to register for the training as an individual or for an instructor, supervisor, or administrator to register a group or class for pre-service education or professional development.
Just go to the Project ENABLE website and click on the pink Login/Register button in the top right corner of the screen. Registration is required to enter the website, but use is totally free. You can choose to explore the overall site, select a single module or topic, or go through the entire training. Once you have registered, your personal data, any notes you take, test scores, or certificates you receive will be securely stored on your profile and available to you at any time.
Features of note include the interactive room design activity in Module 5: Planning an Accessible Library and our Project ENABLE Certificate of Completion. The interactive room design activity provides you with the ability to redesign your space to meet accessibility standards under laws you will learn about in our training. The Project ENABLE Certificate of Completion will be awarded after you have completed all five modules and received a score of at least three (out of five) on the quizzes at the end of each module.
In additional to the launch of our Project ENABLE training site, we will soon be recruiting thirty teams of inclusive educators nationwide to attend our face-to-face training workshops. Each team, led by a school librarian, will be comprised of the librarian, a general educator, and a special educator. These thirty inclusive educator teams will attend one of two, four-and-a-half-day workshops held at Syracuse University during summer 2013.
If you wish to put together a team and apply to be considered for Project ENABLE onsite training, application forms are available on the Project ENABLE website. The form must be completed by the team leader (librarian), and information about each team member will be required. Several university faculty from school library programs nationwide will also attend the training sessions.
If you are interested, we encourage you to learn more about our face-to-face summer training workshops and to register for our free online training by visiting Project ENABLE online.
For more information about Project ENABLE, contact Dr. Ruth Small at drruth@syr.edu or Jessica Stewart, project assistant, at jstewa05@syr.edu.
Ruth V. Small, Ph.D. is Director of Project ENABLE and is Laura J. & L. Douglas Meredith Professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. She directs the School Media Program and is Founding Director of Syracuse University’s Center for Digital Literacy. She may be contacted at drruth@syr.edu.
Programs
Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program