Vision of the Future

Image from erelations.info

Blog: thestaffroomchat.blogspot.ca

For my vision of the future, I decided to consider my future employment as a Teacher Librarian at an elementary school. I was able to connect with a current Teacher Librarian at my daughter’s elementary school, and based on my experiences there, I decided to design this final assignment as if I were the Teacher Librarian at that school and what kinds of things I would do in order to nudge the teachers there into the direction of 21^st century educators. I have worked with many of the staff there in different ways over the years, and have already developed a positive relationship with many of the staff and students there. Based on my connection with many of the staff members, I realize that many of them do not incorporate technology into their classrooms. My goal would be to introduce them to different media tools that they could incorporate with their students ­– not to change what they are doing – as many of them are excellent educators – but to enhance the learning environment for the students. I also wanted to consider that many of these teachers may not be using these tools in their classroom, simply due to the fact that they are not familiar with them. As William Kist states: “…a disinclination to use new media in the classroom may simply stem from uncertainty and limited familiarity with the possibilities” (Kist, 2010, 6). I recall one instance recently where I suggested a blogging website to a teacher to incorporate with her grade 5 class. After she had introduced it to her students, she was excited to approach me in the hallway and tell me how much the students enjoyed blogging. This sparked in interest in me to find a simple way to communicate to the teachers at the school ways to incorporate these kinds of tools into their classrooms.

During the LIBE 477 course, I developed an enjoyment of blogging our learning experiences each week. Many of the reflections I had were based on my step by step learning of each individual tool, as many of these tools were new to me. I decided my approach to teaching about these tools in my blog would also be step by step, so that other teachers would hopefully not feel overwhelmed when introduced to some of these tools. My goal was to keep it simple, and to hopefully provide enough incentive for teachers to be willing to step out of their comfort zone and give some of these tools a try!

This elementary school does not have much in terms of technological equipment, so part my vision would be to advocate for the purchase of some new equipment for the school and make some changes to the layout of the library to accommodate this new equipment. My goal is to not just add equipment, but have more of a Learning Commons aspect in mind. I would like to see the library as a “central and collaborative hub for instruction, research, and learning, as well as a place to use innovative technologies and information resources” (Colburn Harland,P. 2011, xiii).  As part of the redesign of the library, I would remove some of the large round tables which take up a lot of space, and create some work stations for laptop use. Getting the school to incorporate wifi access would be a necessary part of increasing access to the internet. I would also like to have a set of ipads that could be borrowed from the library for classroom use. These ipads could have multiple uses for all grade levels, with convenient access to the internet.  Each teacher would be provided with their own laptop for ease of mobility, and each classroom would either have a projection unit that could be connected to the teacher’s laptop, or a Smartboard for each classroom, including the library. This school has purchased three Smartboards so far, but only one of them is connected and functional at this point. Getting the rest of the classrooms set up would be part of my vision for the school’s technological future.

I would also develop a school library website/blog for student, teacher, and parent use. This would be updated regularly to keep everyone updated on events, new books, new resources, and other pertinent information regarding the school community. In another course that I took, we watched a webcast by Meredith Farkas. She brought up a significant point for me regarding the usefulness of library websites. She comments that “we can do two things. We can try to make our Websites more user friendly and more what our students want. And that may have some effect. But, we also need to go where our users are. We need to put our content where our users eyes go online. And we need to make it easy for them to take our content and get it how, when, and where they want it.” A library website that is relevant and usable could be a challenge to create, but in my vision, I would create a website that becomes an extension of the library and the services it provides.

For the teachers, I would also like to incorporate a library wiki so that it would become a central location for resource sharing, and also a simple way for teachers to develop a community of learning within the staff. It could become a place where ideas are shared, lessons are contributed, links are presented, and questions can be answered. As Richardson states: “The collaborative environment that wikis facilitate can teach students [and teachers] much about how to work with others, how to create community, and how to operate in a world where the creation of knowledge and information is more and more becoming a group effort” (Richardson, 69). As educators, we are trying to instill the collaborative community with students, and I feel this is something that should be facilitated with the teaching staff of the school as well.

Challenges:

I think the first challenge of this assignment was trying to figure out which tool to use to present the information to teachers regarding Web 2.0 tools – I narrowed it down to either a weebly, blog or a wiki. I have become comfortable with blogging over the past 7 months, and am familiar with how to embed documents and add new posts. I have had opportunities to work with a wiki and weebly, and appreciate the collaborative aspect to a wiki, but I was not as familiar with how to embed photos, videos, and other tools within the wiki or weebly. I was also unhappy with the limited design templates with the wiki, so I decided on the blog format. If I find in my future employment that a wiki would be more useful, then I can switch it up later – the benefits of having these useful tools at my fingertips!

The other challenge, after deciding on the blog format, was deciding how to make it look for visual appeal, and ease of use. What I like about using weebly and wikis are that the pages are easy to access, and navigation can be simple when trying to find specific information related to a topic. Having a drop down menu is appealing, and allows for convenient access to see what information is available within certain topics. I felt that this blog would have to incorporate a fairly simple layout, with visible topic headings, so that teachers who are new to using this kind of format would find it user friendly. I also did not want to overwhelm teachers with a lot of new tools, so I decided to narrow it down to six that teachers could explore, and from there, hopefully they would pick one or two to incorporate into their classrooms.

Deciding on which six to include in the blog was also another challenge, as I had to think of it from the perspective of an elementary school – which has a wide range of student abilities, and also which tools a Kindergarten teacher may be interested in as compared to a Grade 7 teacher. I decided to use a few of my personal favourites, and ones that would be appropriate for elementary school use.

Overall, my comfort level with Web 2.0 tools has grown during this course. Looking back at my first blog post for this course, my personal reflection was: “This new course, which will explore Web 2.0 and the way technology can be incorporated into learning is exciting, yet also a bit scary for me as I tread into new waters. I hope to gain new insights, and become comfortable with using these web-based tools, so in the future, when I am in a TL position, I will be able to share my knowledge with my colleagues and how they can have a bigger impact on student learning” (Sauer, N. 2013). I am hoping that my new-found excitement about these educational opportunities will transfer over to my teacher colleagues, and they will be eager to move in the direction of 21^st Century educators.

Cited:

Colburn Harland, P. (2011). The Learning Commons: Seven Simple Steps to Transform your Library. Santa Barbara CA: Libraries Unlimited.

Farkas, M. (2007, June 15). My Top Technology Trends for 2007 | Information Wants To Be Free. Retrieved from http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2007/06/15/my-top-technology-trends-for-2007/ 

Kist, W. (2010). The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Sauer, N. (2013). Semester 2 begins…the adventure continues! My Investigation of Web 2.0 - LIBE477. nsauer77.blogspot.ca