Five Ways Your School Library Can Keep Up With Modern Technology

For many years, libraries have been an integral part of your students’ education, fostering a love of reading, offering a wide variety of valuable resources, and encouraging the pursuit of knowledge. Though libraries have maintained their position of importance in educating students, the school library has undergone many changes over the years.

Gone are the days when libraries were simply quiet spaces filled to the brim with books. Today’s libraries, like other sectors of life, have modernized their approach to operations, not only fostering a love of reading, but also supporting their students as they navigate a technology-driven world. In this blog, we have compiled a list of five ways you can modernize your school library’s approach to technology, ultimately creating a more accessible space your students can turn to for their educational needs.

Consider which of your school library’s books are actually being checked out, and which ones are collecting dust. Ensuring that your school library’s inventory is aligned with your students’ passions and school’s curriculum can be a great way to ensure that the space within your library is being utilized effectively.

Offering digital versions of books and other resources helps increase your students’ ability to access valuable learning resources. It allows them to access critical information in a way that is more familiar to them from the convenience of their devices, whether that be a phone, a tablet, or their computers. This could make conducting research for school assignments significantly easier and help continue to foster a student’s love of learning.

Yes, libraries used to be a space solely dedicated to quiet learning and research. However, today’s world lends itself to a need for libraries to become so much more than places to read. They should become hubs for collaboration, creativity, and project-based learning, allowing students to bounce ideas off each other and learn within a group setting.

Setting up flexible spaces that allow for group work, projects, and even digital creations that are equipped with comfortable seating, whiteboards, and access to technology can be a great way to help your students learn how to work together toward a goal. And the learning doesn’t have to stop there. Your library could even host events that create opportunities for your students to further their knowledge about subjects that interest them, such as author presentations, maker workshops, and coding sessions.

If your school has the space, you could offer access to these tools while also ensuring there is still space for quiet learning.

One aspect of modernizing school libraries that is far too often overlooked is the need for streamlining the payment experience. Whether that involves paying for rentals, overdue fees, or other fines, digitalizing your payments could help your library ensure accurate data collection, take some work off your librarian’s hands, and create an easier payment experience for parents and students alike.

The EFS Library and Media Center product suite will help your staff save valuable time by granting them the ability to accept online and mobile payments for rentals, fees and fines. With the ability to accept payments by card, cash, check, or our convenient K12 Student Wallet, our platform will allow you to accept payments with A+ effectiveness and efficiency.

These days, students are hustling and bustling, their schedules jam packed with schoolwork, extracurriculars, and friendly hangs. Creating a web space that showcases your school’s inventory and allows students to place orders they can pick up could make reading and learning significantly more accessible for them.