Interview

For my interview, I spoke with Meg Eggleton, librarian at Alexander Central High School. Mrs. Eggleton has worked at the elementary, middle and high school level in the media center, with the last 10 years spent at Alexander Central. As the only high school in the county, the student population is large.

In talking about how they use technology in the library, Mrs. Eggleton spends much of her time with the other library workers supervising students and classes in one of the school's computer labs. She does some troubleshooting with computers, but the school has an IT person who handles most of that work.

Classes come into the library sporadically with some English teachers being the most frequent visitors. Juniors and seniors often come with their English classes to help research for the senior projects. Mrs. Eggleton then has some opportunity to help the students search the Internet for resources or help find materials through the library's catalog.

Mrs. Eggleton gets little opportunity to use technology with students in the library. Few teachers bring their students in for tutorials in basic programs because most high school students receive some sort of computer class that shares with them the basics.

One struggle the school and Mrs. Eggleton face is the fact the community is small and not overly wealthy, so not all students have access to a computer at home in order to develop more skills. Many of the students rely on time they can spend in the computer labs in order to get work done for classes.

Mrs. Eggleton often attends conferences to learn new processes or information that she takes back to share with the teachers. Unfortunately, she does not get the opportunity to share this with classes of students. While she learns about great new programs that could incorporate technology, she finds the same issue we see again and again - time is so limited for teachers to teach what is required, it leaves very little time for learning new or interesting programs.

Mrs. Eggleton would really like to incorporate more technology into the school, but due to the extreme budget cuts the state has faced it has been difficult to make major changes. While she tries to seek out free resources it is often difficult to make enough of an impact that it can help the school. She is also nearing retirement and knows it will be difficult for the other workers who would remain to keep up anything she could start. Mrs. Eggleton loves the library and the students she works with, but is facing so many of the challenges that we all face - how to improve technology in limited space, budget, and time.