Time To Practice What We Preach

Here comes the exciting part of the course – and the most daunting. It’s one thing to learn new information. It’s another to put that learning into action and produce a bona fide artifact that will be useful in my community. I suppose this sense of trepidation I feel in accomplishing this might be similar to how students’ sense of excitement and overwhelm when given an open-ended learning task to tackle world problems. There is no learning experience more authentic than applying your learning to create something useful in the world, but it comes with an intense pressure and feeling of inadequacy.

I’ve been using Google Sites in these early months of the school year to put together some learning tools which I hoped will be useful for my colleagues and the students. I thought this would be a good time to share a preview of each document.

School Website

My priority from the offset of the school year has been to build a school library website. I strongly wish for a centralized location to share information related to the AR program at our school, research tips, information on how to access databases from home, and book lists. These are all areas where I receive the most requests, and this would be a useful resource to parents, students, and teachers.

Scope and Sequence

Meanwhile, our school technology leader and I have been collaborating on a Google Doc to create a cohesive IT and digital citizenship scope and sequence that incorporates the BC Ministry Curriculum on ADST, IB documents on ICT in PYP, Teaching and Learning with Technology, and Technology and the Design of Learning Spaces in the Library, as well as recommendations from Common Sense Media, MediaSmarts, and ISTE on digital citizenship. So far we have organized skills into three strands:

1. Technology Skills (learning to use technology)
2. Information Literacy and Digital Citizenship (learning about technology),
3. Technology Integration (learning with technology).

Learning Technologies Site

Through our exploration of a documents creating a technology scope and sequence, we discovered that another gap in our school is the amount of technology we subscribe to and pay for versus the reality of the (limited) technology that is actually being used by teachers and students. The tech leader and I embarked on a new project to create another Google Site that provides teachers with information on all the technology available across different devices (iPads, Chromebooks, Websites) and technology that can be used to teach different subject areas.

Narrowing the Focus

Like most librarians, my tendencies lean towards trying to do too much at once. The creation of all three of these documents are large projects that I am trying to complete outside of my regular teaching and library duties, and each project expands with every new aspect of technology that I learn about in this course. However, the process of sharing these documents on this blog has helped me to select the Library Website as my final project for this course, as I have more autonomy and control over this document. Inevitably, there will be elements from the Learning Technologies website that will overlap, such as research technologies and information on digital citizenship, but this underscores their importance.

The first step I have taken is to decide on my audience for this project. Although a school website has many functions, such as providing information about the library for students and parents, being a resource for teachers, and connecting with the greater library community, I have determined that I would like this to primarily be a functional teaching tool for my fellow educators at school. If it is useful, they will be the ones who will eventually help to disseminate the library website and its related information to the greater community. I only see the upper grades sporadically and they are the students who would find it the most useful.

My learning from this course has implored me to expand on this website project beyond my initial vision. I first aspired to create a document that contained all library-related resources and was easy to navigate. My desperation to get it up and running had me looking towards a very basic website with simple links. This course has really boosted the value of YouTube in my eyes, and helped me to understand its appeal to students and teachers. I now would like to incorporate more video elements onto the Library website. One example where I am planning on using this is the tab for booklists. I was planning on typing them out or creating PDFs for different genres and ages, but I have begun to create YouTube playlists with curated book trailers for our younger and older students and will include this as part of the Booklist tab. I would also love to create a welcome video on the library homepage, with photo and video highlights of what our students are doing and circulation statistics. I see this as a huge opportunity for library advocacy.

With my newfound intention of building my PLN, I would really like to encourage others to do so as well. In the context of the library website, I feel I can present the idea of forming a learning network and suggest individual starting points for teachers – and ultimately for students – to effectively build their own. Even if no one seeks external networks initially, I hope that the minimal outcome of this website will be that it will become a well-used digital space that encourages collaboration within the school. Our teachers rarely have the opportunity to share the digital tools and technologies they are using within one another. I hope to create a bridge between them by allowing them to contribute to the website and share additional resources, such as for research and book list recommendations.

In all honestly, incorporating information about learning networks is something I am not fully prepared to share at this point when I have not had much time to personally engage in them myself. It would be like recommending a recipe to someone when I haven’t yet tested it in my own kitchen. In my preliminary searches for learning networks, I have already discovered the enormous amounts of time it takes to carefully select learning networks that are worthwhile of teachers’ busy schedules. It is an exhaustive task to find the communities – valuable ones on social networks (Instagram, Twitter) as well as blogs, organizations and websites. It also takes time to sign up for online communities, engage in them, and see if they are useful. I am feeling overwhelmed by the breadth of things out there and I also don’t want to be online more than I need to. By building a PLN, I can imagine being caught up in updates and replies. Time is not on the side of teachers. I know many who do not have social media because of this, and I can foresee a great deal of reluctance for teachers to build a PLN. It makes me question whether this will be a fruitful and worthwhile quest but I am determined to incorporate it on the website in some manner that I have yet to determine.

Being a T-L, I know my purpose is to be useful and relevant to the community. If I am going to promote building a PLN, I must unequivocally be convinced of it myself and to be able to model the successes that came come from it. Alternatively, perhaps, teachers can merely reap the benefits of my expanded PLN because I will be able to connect with them to resources that they never imagined they would access. I really cannot foresee how this will all unfold, but I am certain that student engagement will be the greatest measurable success criteria. I keep reminding myself that we are a technology focussed school and all teachers should be using technology in innovative ways.

Marketing the Document

I hesitate to call this a website because of my documented barriers in a previous post. I have since been given permission to share my library website design with Marketing and Communications and have them build a portal page within the school website. They will pull all the information from my Google Site and build it within a Library portal page. Parents, students, and teachers have access to this site. However, there are restrictions with the addition of external links to the school portal pages, so I cannot have the school link the Google site I create onto the school website. Intuitively, I know that teachers (and students) are less likely to use the site if they need to access it through the school portal page. Since the creation of the site is primarily for them, I have decided I will push forward the Google Site and circulate it among staff in an email as a shared document. Although the design is akin to a website, the function is more similar to a shared G+ suite file, and this is how I will be marketing the “document” to my school. This is one reason why parents are not part of the audience for this website; the information communicated to them through the portal page should be sufficient for elementary school parents who seek additional resources to help their younger children.

I do plan on sharing this document with the educational administration at our school because I want them to be aware of the extent that I work with students and teachers, and the layers of learning enhancements that I support the school community in. We have weekly after school meetings on Mondays, and I will be asking for a time slot once the website is complete so that I can formally introduce the staff to this document and answer any questions they have about it.

Further Research

I will continue reading Digital Citizenship In Action for ideas on authentic digital engagement. I’m going to teach myself how to use Powtoon or another movie maker to create a video so that I can come up with one to introduce everyone to the school library. I have a librarian friend who recently shared one that she created for her school, so I will get in touch with her on how she pulled statistics from Follett and what technology she used to make her video. I’m also going to review other school library websites I have discovered in the past (including Diane’s) to glean ideas from those. It feels like there are a lot of moving parts at the moment, but I know that I must lay a solid foundation for something that will hopefully only require fine tuning going forward.