How well do you use technology?

Wow, the school holidays are quickly coming to an end. I have been doing a few things over the holidays, checking emails and following TL news on the social networking scene, but I have not been as much of a participant as I could have been, and I have been terribly slack with my blog.

I am going to work on that. From now on, when I come across an interesting email that I think may be of use to myself later on, or to anyone who stumbles across my blog, I am going to share it here.

For a start, I am going to share a link to a website that provides outlines for rubrics to assess the level at which staff are using technology:
Doug Johnson's Website, CODE77 Rubrics
What an important thing for schools to use - rather than just assessing students, assess the staff that are teaching them, and ensure they have training to fill in the gaps. How important is our understanding and use of technology in this day and age?


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by * Polly *

I felt encouraged to find that I was at level 3 or 4 for many of the sections :) Still have some things to work on though. I think I will make student assessment using technology a focus this year. Prepared assessment (too often I rush into an amazing unit, and the students gain a lot from it, but then it is difficult and time consuming to assess them afterwards, and to compare befores and afters).. I look forward to discussing and planning this with the TL I am job sharing with this year.

Where do you, and your school's teachers sit within such a rubric?

Time

Section 1.8 of the readings discusses the fact that as teacher librarians we need to balance what we do. We have important roles supporting teachers and students, teaching information literacy, and cooperative planning; the organisation of our resources, and effective cataloguing are important to make these things as effective as possible and to save time whilst doing them, but we need to make sure that we are saving time overall - so spending more time cataloguing than we are saving elsewhere is not sensible use of time. It is better to not have a perfect library with perfectly catalogued resources, as long as it is still an effective one and the important roles of the teacher librarian can be carried out effectively as well.

This resonates heavily with the perfectionist within me, and I suspect that I will need to remind myself of this important detail in the future.

Facing the challenges

It has been a slow week. Finding it hard to keep the motivation levels up at this stage, especially with weekends filled with travelling and weddings at the moment. Falling back into my old habits, spending too long doing things that I don't need to be doing, and finding any kind of distraction from what I should be doing. Hoping to get my brain back on topic by focusing it in this blog post.

I finally finished the readings for topic 1. At this stage I am not going to search for other relevant readings, and I feel that I have some catching up to do, and I need to make sure I am organised for my assignments as next week is going to be very challening, trying to study away from home (well, my current home, and I'll have my family around to distract me, and no James to keep me on task).

I am finding it a little difficult at this stage to directly apply what I am learning, to make comparisons and see what impact what I am learning will have. This is because I am not working in a library, and have not found the time this year to really get involved with one. I will now try to specifically apply what I have learned about digital citizenship so far to what I will do as a teacher librarian.

There are some particular things that I have learned about that I will cover here:

- Transliteracy: I will need to support students in applying literacy skills and learning to different kinds of texts and technologies. I expect to do this by:
+ Encouraging both students and teachers to try, and apply, new technologies/programs/Web tools.
+ Ensuring I have an up to date knowledge of these technologies.
+ Set a good example by showing my own transliteracy skills.

- Digital Citizenship: This is more than just participating in the digital world, it is participating responsibly. I expect to be a good digital citizen, and to encourage my students to be the same, by:
+ Adhering to, and advocating, the 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship as outlined in Digital Citizenship in Schools. These could be advocated with posters, within lessons/units of work, and in discussions with students in groups or individually as issues arise.
+ Always showing my respect for others when online - thinking about how what I write/do may affect others, and making this thought process clear to students.

Forseeable challenges in the role as promoter of these things:
- Amount of time spent with each student - Would I have classes of students at specific times? What would be the focus in these lessons? How would digital citizenship skills and understandings be portrayed to those students who do not get regular library time?
- Teacher attitudes - Will the other staff in the school in which I work understand the importance of digital citizenship and transliteracy? Would they see it as something for the TL to deal with on her own, or would it be a whole school issue with the TL the leader to turn to for support and ideas? Ultimately I would aim for this, and would work towards it by educating staff over time if necessary.
- Facilities - What technologies will be available to students, and where? Will they have computer access in the classroom as well as the library? What will the student:computer ratio be? Laptops are a great way to combat this, especially as the become more affordable, and I would encourage this as an option, but obviously would have to find ways to work around this challenge depending on the situation.

This has been helpful - starting to apply what I am learning to what I may encounter in the future. I shall try to do this more in my blogs. Application helps the learning process.

Now, to move on to the next step and get some more reading under control.

References:

The Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship. (2007). Digital Citizenship in Schools (pp. 13-37). International Society for Technology in Education.

Be prepared...

As we said when we were girl guides. Though now I ask you to be prepared for an onslaught of seemingly random thoughts and ideas, as I rapidly progress through my readings in order to rapidly progess through my assignments.

Firstly focussing on 'Information Environment', with that assignment being due... very soon...

Three key factors I think a primary school teacher librarian would need to take into account before providing an information service to teachers:


- How the teachers would like that information provided - with busy schedules, it's going to be important that teachers feel that they are being helped, not just having more of their time consumed. What actions will make teachers feel that the TL is saving them time by providing them with information? What can the TL say to make this clear?

- What information teachers want - It is important that as professionals we continue to expand our knowledge of our field; as such, things like professional journals and new information on teaching/learning are important, but once again these can be time consuming. The TL needs to find out which information is important to which teachers, and to inform them appropriately as they find articles/information, rather than just throwing whatever they find at everyone.

- The TL would particularly need to take into account the attitudes of the teachers - how they percieve the role of the TL. They may need to clarify their position and capabilities to the teachers as a whole, and to outline just what they can do to help them. If the role that they wish to play is not clear, this could end up with frustration in both camps: The TL frustrated that the teachers do not seem to respect them in their role and are not making the most of such a great resource, the teachers feeling that the TL is not available as a resource as they have not made their commitment clear and have not clarified what they can do to help.

What I learned from ETL401 Assignment 1

This assignment put on a nice front, asking for 1000 words less than the ETL503 one. The first 500 words though took a very long time. I actually felt like I had to drag the words out of me when talking about an 'information literate school community' and I am not convinced that the words I dragged out were very good ones.

I feel like the rest of the assignment flowed better, but as usual I am not confident in how I went (this does not mean I will not be disappointed if/when I get a mark that is below average).

In the assignment I discussed the importance of the teacher librarian in the creation of an information literate school community - I can definitely see the role that a TL can play, the potential that role has to make a difference. I can also see though that there are many obstacles in the way of TLs, particularly the one which I looked at in my paper - that of classroom teachers not realising the aforementioned potential of the TL. Perhaps classroom teachers do not realise the importance of information literacy (perhaps I should have mentioned that in my assignment....), but in the school I was looking at they definitely do not collaborate with the TL for resources, and for the units their students are working on. The students are not given library time to acquire resources for the unit they are working on either.

I looked at some solutions for this, including the TL approaching a small number of staff members and getting them to collaborate and use the library more effectively, with the idea that this would catch on with other teachers over the years. I wonder if this would work. I wonder if this would lead to the importance of hte library being raised in people opinions, and therefore more time and money being put into it in the long run - would this lead to a better library over all? I think many teacher librarians are in a situation where they feel overwhelmed by all the obstacles in their way to creating a better library environment and being the TL they have been trained to be and wish to be - but perhaps if as TLs we choose one obstacle to focus on and see where that leads us. Perhaps if we focus on the right things, the library could eventually become the heart of the school, as I believe it should be.

One of the interesting things I got out of this assignment, was understanding the implications of RFF a bit better, and thinking about how much blame can be laid on the RFF itself. Initially the TL I spoke to suggested the fact that she was an RFF teacher as being an obstacle. The more I discussed this (Roy was extremely helpful) and thought about it however, the more I realised that RFF was not necessarily the problem, but people's attitudes towards it. Every teacher has planning time, and at those times another teacher takes his or her class. Just because they are relieving the teacher does not mean they cannot play an important teaching role. Teachers should respect that role, and the TL herself should know inwardly and outwardly that she is playing an important part in the school community and the students' learning. Also, it does not prevent the TL from making some kind of difference to the information literacy of the students - it is still possible to collaborate with teachers, and for students to use at least some of their 'library time' working on their current unit, as I stated in my paper.

Hopefully this assignment will help me to remember in the future that I can play an important role as a TL, and that information literacy is an important goal for a school. Hopefully it will help me if I am ever in a situation where I am not respected for my knowledge and abilities as a teacher librarian, but am looked at primarily as an RFF teacher, to see myself as the former, and to slowly work on getting others to do the same.

We can make a difference.