On the road to learning

Theme Two: Managing and Evaluating Reference Services geeksaresexy.net Out of everything that I have read over the past several weeks, the word "access" is what has stuck with me and made the biggest impression. The role of the teacher librarian is vast, and while I am still learning the details of many of the administrative tasks that the job requires, I think one of the most important things to remember is that the teacher librarian is there to provide  access  to the resources in the library. I would like to break my thoughts down into two main sections: accessibility for students and accessibility for teachers. Access for Students The Lesson 7 notes on Canvas state that TLs are often misinterpreted as "managers" of resources rather than "promoters" of resources (Ehrensberger, 2018). I like to think of the teacher librarian's role as one that both manages  and  promotes the use of resources by becoming the  bridge  linking the student wi...

Supporting Learners Through the Library: Digital and Media Literacy Digital literacy is defined as "the interest, attitude, and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others" (BC Ministry of Education). With the rise of advocacy for technology use within the classroom, there is a growing limitless potential for what redefining learning using technology looks like. With digital media, the key is learning to use it effectively. The digital environment is very different to a physical one, and students need to be taught how to navigate and self-monitor their technology usage. I like the word "mindfulness" that is used in the module - it brings to mind the responsibility of our actions online and being critical of what we read. This week, our challenge is to curate effective online tools that we can ...

Supporting Teachers' ICT Curriculum and Pedagogy Ellagrin | Shuttershock Something that I've really come to value over the years as I've delved deeper and deeper into the world of teaching is the potential of learning from others. In an environment where I have always considered myself to be much "greener" than others, I rely on and depend on the expertise, experience, and knowledge of other teachers to help support my own learning. Thus, the topic this week about helping to support one another's learning is something that I can really connect with. Back in China, with the small number of staff that we had to work with, professional development could only be achieved in person by sharing with one another what we know. We didn't have the luxury of attending PSA's or other professional development workshops due to the relative isolation we lived in in our dingy, backwater countryside town. Each month at our professional development workshops, the...

Developing your own ICT Skills and Pedagogy Engaging in professional development is something that comes fairly naturally to me. I have always been a curious individual at heart, and whenever I have a question or want to learn more about something, I will spend hours on the task until I feel that I have learned it sufficiently enough that the knowledge or skill feels like my own. As I plan for lessons and units, I am always searching for the best strategies to teach the content to students, so naturally I find myself watching YouTube videos or reading essays and papers as I am planning my lessons. I am independent, motivated (when I want to be), and driven to complete my tasks in the best possible way that I know how. In my opinion, my downfall lies in being able to connect with people. This weakness exists in part due to my introverted personality, and also in part due to the isolation of having worked in China. With the Great Firewall blocking all forms of Western social media th...

Fostering a Reading Culture in Schools Poster-Street.com (2018) This particular topic really resonates with me as part of the challenge that I found while I worked in China was getting the students excited about reading... in ENGLISH. The interest in reading among our high school students was already much lower than what I had witnessed when I was their age, and coupled with the fact that English is not their native language, the reading culture at the school was very sparse. As a staff we struggled quite a bit on coming up with solutions for how to promote reading and literacy at the school. One of our solutions was performing reading assessments on our students to help them be better-informed about their reading level. While Parrott argues that knowing their reading level can "disempower young readers" as "student choice is a huge part of reading motivation" (2017), we found that part of the reason our students were disengaged and disinterested in what they...

Evaluation of a Reference Work Part 1 - Choosing and Evaluating Gale | Cengage When I first started working on this assignment, I did not have consistent access to a school library at the time, and thus had some difficulties deciding on what to choose for my reference work. I decided to scour the online databases and library directory of my alma mater, Seaquam Secondary School in the Delta School District for a suitable resource, and stumbled across the Gale Virtual Reference Library database that the school had a subscription to. Within this database, I found an e-book copy of Ancient Civilizations Reference Library , a 4-volume collection of encyclopedias specifically targeting the subject of ancient civilizations, a very popular topic of study for both elementary and high school students. I decided to use this as the focus of my evaluation. As stated in Riedling, "the purpose of encyclopedias are to educate and inform. ...These reference sources are unique in that the...