Debbie shapes the educational vision of NoodleTools, with the mission of providing educators with tools to teach academic research as an analytical and creative process.
She is widely recognized for her work on innovative curriculum design, thoughtful technology integration, and multiple literacies.
An early pioneer in the introduction of online teaching and learning in elementary education, she was featured in Time magazine (June 19, 1995) as their Grand Prize winner for innovative curriculum. She has been honored as a Library Journal “Mover and Shaker,” American Memory Fellow at the Library of Congress, and received the President’s Award for curricular leadership from the California School Library Association.
With broad experience in schools as a curriculum coordinator, director of a combined library/edtech department, and Assistant Head of a highly-diverse independent school, she publishes, lectures and consults internationally. Most recently she is providing expertise to Libraries Transform, an advocacy initiative of the American Library Association (ALA), and to two grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services:
• U Michigan, Ann Arbor “Data Literacy for School Librarians,” a two-year project to develop data- and statistical-literacy skills in high school librarians so they can better support critical comprehension skills in their students; and
• Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) “School Educators Advancing STEM Learning,” a pioneering three-year project to develop graduate-level teaching modules for educators of pre-service librarians and STEM teachers.
Co-author of Growing Schools (LU 2013), a book that documents the varied professional development roles of school librarians, she serves on a national advisory board that is visioning a graduate program in school leadership for cohorts of school principals, library media specialists, and experienced teachers that blends online learning with extended supervised clinical experiences.
She was the founding editor of Knowledge Quest, the journal of the American Association of School Librarians (1996-2010), and is currently on the ALA Publishing Oversight Board. She authors a monthly column, “Friction: How to Design Deliberate Thinking into the Research Process,” for the magazine School Library Connection.