Trying to balance my life, one day at a time. Embrace the chaos and enjoy the small moments. Be present and watch the movie of your life.
Whelp, this is it! To say that this has been a whirlwind in an understatement. I feel like this has been a long six weeks, yet it has flown by in a sense as well. I have to say that when we began this course I was a little taken aback by the amount of freedom that we had in our own Inquiries and areas of interest. Especially since I was taking another UBC course that was extremely structured with a ton of required readings. Now, I think that this course is such a powerful way of learning and I am so thankful that we were able to research our areas of interest.
I know that coming from a tech background I have attended workshops that were great, however, I already knew a lot of the content and I honestly thought that I may have been able to deliver it to the audience in a way that may be more applicable, because to be honest, when I looked around the room it was evident that most people were either disinterested or in the same boat that I was in. I was a little weary that this course would be similar, yet I was pleasantly surprised! It was so amazing to look further into my own areas of interest and be able to apply some of my findings to my teaching practice.
I think that the biggest take away from this course is the PLN that has been created through our Blog posts and following each other on social media. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning from my peers in this course and finding out more about them as people and educators. I am really hoping that this will kickstart my active involvement in educational social media.
I really enjoyed completing the final project. It was reminiscent of preparing for presentations, which is something that makes me nervous and anxious about, however, once I am finished I feel like I have accomplished so much and have improved my presentations skills every time. I miss this aspect of working with my peers and I am hoping that there is a school out there looking for a TL that is enthusiastic about teaching staff about tech gadgets. I know that I have made a step in the right direction by furthering my education yet again and I hope that this will help me reach my goal.
I leave this course with so much hope and wonder about the future of the Library and our education system in general. This pandemic has been filled with its ups and downs but I do feel like it has brought a little bit of light to the state of our education system. I am hoping the next time we try to negotiate for small class sizes, increased wages and more funding in general, the public will be behind us this time.
Hopefully I will keep up with my blog as it was my vision when I started this website a couple years ago. The content will change, but I love getting my thoughts out and these blog posts have almost been therapeutic. I leave you with this powerful video that was presented to me at the end of my other UBC course, it’s too good not to share to others that will appreciate it. Let’s shift our thinking, move forward into the 21st century and guide our fellow staff members to join that journey with you. We have been told to lead by example, so as staff we all need to be moving forward as a unit and learning together.
My vision – Sorry if it’s a little long, as mentioned I am used to giving long presentations and like to talk a lot, as most teachers do (I apologize for the title slide! I just noticed the rawness of it now!).
When thinking about my vision project I was a little stuck. I was not quite sure how I wanted to portray my vision for the Library Learning commons and/or learning in the 21st century. I have been inspired throughout this course through our readings and different sources that I have found on my own, yet I was still unsure about how I wanted to move forward with this project. I have a passion for educating other teachers so I wanted to approach this final vision project with other teachers in mind and use concrete examples from my own experience and through the texts and sources that I have found throughout this course.
I was presented with one video from my other UBC course that was my beginning inspiration for what I wanted to see as the future of the LLC. Throughout this course I have discussed the shift of the LLC and how I want to expand my social media presence and use social media as CPD. I think that my current school may be shifting towards this type of model after our library had been weeded through and we had a change in admin in February. I feel that with new leadership we are going to be moving forward with how Education needs to shift. Our new administrator is active on social media and is up to date on Ed Tech pedagogy. I feel that this support is so important when it comes to shifting the LLC or being supported in 21st learning practices. I had talked in previous blog posts how I got shut down a lot when it came to moving forward, however, I feel under new leadership this is going to change. Even though I am not the TL at my school, my goal for next year is to work closely with the TL at my site and help her move forward with media curation in the library. When I was working part time at the district we shared an office and she was always eager to learn and try new things. I know that she does her best to stay current, so I feel that with some guidance we can work together to shift the Library space to the LLC.
My vision project evolved into some things that I am passionate about and wish to see as we move forward in education. Most of the things that I am passionate about are moving forward with technology and using these tools and resources to their greatest capacity. Again, as I mentioned before I have tried to highlight many of these tools in education to my fellow colleagues and it took a global pandemic and shift to remote learning to get them on board. There is a big positive from all this, in that they have expressed that they will continue to use these platforms moving forward because of the ease of use, tracking and student engagement that they saw during remote learning.
What I also noticed while working with teachers across our district is that is may not necessarily be access or skills, but it’s just what our job is evolving into, which does not naturally allow us to grow as educators. As mentioned earlier, we are faced by obstacles and some teachers will try to overcome those obstacles and some will just let it go and move on. My vision is a little bit about teacher empowerment and what I feel needs to be done in order to move forward with anything in our careers, however, a lot of the times we are stopped dead in our tracks and unfortunately sometimes things cannot be done.
It’s actually kind of fitting that we get yet another update from Mr. Fleming about the return to school. What I really want teachers to focus on my vision is my final point of keeping life balanced, because we are not superheroes and we cannot do it all with ease and grace. Sometimes we are going to seem like we’re falling flat on our face (like I was last week trying to figure out how I was going to complete two final projects!) and that is ok. Take a breather, go on a walk, pet your dog and take some time to be you. Ultimately the better we take care of ourselves, the better people we will be to those around us.
The topic this week is something that I strive to do once I am in a Teacher-Librarian position. Teaching other educators is something that I am passionate about and that is exactly the reason why I am completing my TL certificate. I feel that I am able to build personal relationships with people quite easily and can develop their trust. I think this is the most important thing that you need to do when you are thinking about offering Professional Development to your staff or any other educators in your district.
When I first started attending Pro-D Days in our district I knew that one day I wanted to lead a workshop, I just did not know what I would be an ‘expert’ on in able to lead a workshop. When I took my Yoga Teacher Training in 2014 I thought, yes! I have it! I’ll teach yoga at my CTA (Union) Pro D. Well, 2015 registration came, I thought, no, I’m not ready. Well, 2016 came and I actually opened the application form this time, yet I was still not quite ready.
I did eventually teach a Yoga Pro-D session 🙂 This photo was taken from my first session, Feb 2019 at 8 weeks postpartum I might add! I taught another session this past Feb 2020 at our CTA Pro-D and plan to do so until I’m physically unable 😛
At the beginning of 2016 I found myself in my first Continuing contract and thought to myself, ok, I can make some roots here and build connections with this staff, but how?!?! So I offered to be on the Pro-D committee. When planning our first in house Pro-D the other members of my staff where wondering if they could find a teacher to come in and talk to them about FreshGrade. I had been using this platform for the last year and thought to myself, ok, this is the opportunity that I am looking for. I led a session and from then on my staff came to me with technology questions all the time! I thought that this was wonderful that I was getting to know so many people so quickly. I was so happy I made that step to offer up Pro-D to my staff that I was confident I could share my knowledge again or in another way.
This is where collaboration became such an important part of my job, even as a classroom teacher. During my days of TTOCing I always saw a lot of collaboration in the Middle School years, however, in Elementary, depending on the school, some settings almost felt competitive and resources and ideas were not shared. I think that it’s so important to have conversations with other educators so that you can grasp different views and tackle different thoughts and ideas together. Sue Kimmel discusses the patterns of collaboration with teachers can be broken down into “…orienting, coordinating, making connections, making sense and drifting (2013).” All of these patterns are important but she points out in ‘Making Sense’ that it “…best represents the value of collaboration (2013).” Which I one hundred per cent agree. If we are not having these conversations with others then we could take hours and hours trying to work thing out on our own, when if we just have a 20 minute conversation with a colleague, you may be able to make sense much quicker between the two or more of you.
Feeling accomplished after surviving my first board meeting presentation about our new district laptops.
Now going back to my Leadership journey, fast forward to the end of the 2016/2017 school year when I applied for a 0.5 District Technology Support Teacher role. I thought, well what’s the harm in applying? I had great references from the work that I had done with the staff throughout the year and thought there may be a good chance to get some more interview experience. Needless to say I got the role and continued in this position for 2 years. My entire job was to give Pro-D to other teachers around the district and I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I think I was pretty good at it. My Director of Instruction was a very technical person and often talked in jargon that I know a lot of people don’t always understand. I think I was great at being that middle person for teachers who could explain things in a way that everyone would be able to understand and be on board, or at least give it a try.
Taryn using side by side model for showing learning through Fresh Grade. Use apps like Pic Collage to show examples of work and progress within one image #FOCUSDAY2018
I gained so much experience and confidence leading workshops to my fellow educators.
So moving forward, I strive to keep learning, doing CPD and developing my PLN. During the most recent events in our school system many teachers had to learn how to use a lot of tools in a short amount of time. We were also not able to come in to groups for PRO-D in the most traditional sense. To learn some of these tools our district offered ‘Lunch and Learn Webinars’ that covered topics from how to get the most out of your laptop, various Office 365 tools, and FreshGrade. Since I had the connection to the team I was invited back to run a Webinar on FreshGrade. I have to admit it was a little intimidating at first knowing that I was talking to over 100 teachers in our district, but then I thought to myself afterwards about how powerful the tools are that we have access to. In a short 40min webinar (20min presentation, 20 min Q&A) I was able to get in a lot of information in a short amount of time, yet address a lot of teachers. This webinar was hosted through Microsoft Teams and then recorded so that others could access later on Microsoft Stream if they were not able to attend. So my thoughts are now, why stop? I am completely capable of making little how-to videos for my staff so that we can jump past some of those making sense conversations. I know that other people struggle with technology and trouble shooting, so why not share my knowledge? This is exactly why I hop to get into a TL position in the near future.
A clip from my Webinar on getting started with FreshGrade
Why should we stop sharing our knowledge with not only our own staff, with other educators or Teacher Librarians around the district. Why can’t we host a bi-weekly or monthly webinars for teachers to attend, or record and have them access later. I think that since we have this momentum (I know some teachers are exhausted from everything that they’ve learned an adapted to) we should strive to keep moving forward and keep being connected as a district.
Throughout remote learning a Microsoft Team was also created with other Digital Literate Educators from all around our district. This acted as an Internal PLN for troubleshooting and questions. There was so much value having this accessibility to site contacts to act as a way to help staff all around the district. When something useful was being posted or important information was being passed on to these expert educators we were then to pass this information onto our staff, again, we used Microsoft Teams as our go to for communication on our staff (kind of funny now since I had been pushing it on them for the last 3 years to get rid of mass emails!). I think this is how we move forward. I think this is our way to pass on CPD to fellow staff members. This way we are allowing them to access if and when they feel like it and I think that’s the most important thing to consider when moving forward with staff Pro D.
You are going to have the staff that take all of the information that you are passing along, you will have some information that interests them and you will have some that may not have the time right now to think about their own Pro D and we need to be accepting of all of these circumstances. If you post something on Teams that is of interest to a teacher, they will message or come to you inquiring more or ask to collaborate on what you have passed on.
From all of the reading that I have done through this course it is evident that access is important and teachers have busy schedules. We do not have a lot of time for discussions throughout the regular school day, so if you are allowing them to access on their own time, then you may be able to have these conversations other ways, be it through Teams, email or various social media. I also feel like right now, will my current staff, Teams would be a best bet because this is something that they are now checking often. I would love to set up a Twitter or Instagram for them to check, but this may be something outside of their comfort or interest area so it’s best to stay in shallow water.
Enjoying reading with my son and teaching him the basics of coding 🙂
When starting to think about this topic of fostering a reading cultures in my school, I know that there are many traditionalists that feel like reading should only be from a paper book. I think that as technology has evolved, we are slowly moving away from that mindset. I mean, even for this course we were able to purchase our textbooks on Amazon and read them on a device or print if we felt so inclined.
Our most recent stint in remote learning also opened a lot of educators eyes to what is available online for our students to access. I know that many companies were offering free subscriptions and access during this time of remote learning to help out during these strange times, which was greatly appreciated. I know that having conversations with parents, that they were able to find a whole bunch of resources to keep their child occupied while we were in that limbo phase at the end of March and into April. In my conversations with parents they were getting a lot of use of virtual field trips found online and a lot of people were using Scholastic Learn at home and Math Prodigy
When I was in my Tech Support role, one of my jobs was researching and suggesting different apps to use in an Elementary setting. ‘Epic! Books for Kids‘ was always my number one App that I would suggest and was always well received from both teachers and students. There are a few things that I love about this App. I have shown some of my favourites in the video below.
1. You can use it in a generic sense, without having to ‘set up’ a classroom with students names. I used to just have grade levels and be logged onto the school iPads and then students could use their grade level to look at different books that I suggested, or they could explore on their own.
2. There are ‘Read-to-me’ books which are in the sense our old ‘reading and listening’ stations that we used to have in classrooms with the cassette tapes or CD’s. This is a great feature of the app because it highlights the words as it reads, which I think is much more beneficial than just having the book because this way is teaches the student how to track along the words. There are also audio only (mainly longer chapter books) that can be used for independent book study or helping students who struggle with reading, yet still want to enjoy like everyone else.
3. There are educational videos that are often related to books that students are reading. The great thing about this feature is that you can easily toggle this function on and off as an educator. Personally, I have kept this off for my students when it is reading time so that I know that they are finding a book rather than watching a video. If we were doing something like research I would turn this function back on.
4. With permission of course, you can set up a class (even use avatar names if you choose) list with names so that you can track the books that students are reading. You can see how long they spent reading, how many books they have read and also assign books or quizzes to go along with reading.
During return to school I got to see how much students love this app. They are able to find books to suit their mood. My favourite memory of all this was when my students started to ask each other jokes from the books that they had found. They started to naturally rate each others jokes, which I found hilarious. It was awesome to hear their discussions. I could also monitor my students that were still learning at home to see if they were reading.
My grade 3/4 class reading on Epic! Books for kids during return to school in June 2020
I also noticed that the students who were in class were able to read for much longer periods of time than they had during our traditional ‘D.E.A.R.’ time. From January to March I used to have to put up a timer on our Smartboard for 15min so that students were aware and could see ‘how much longer’ we HAD to read. Often times if I felt like this time was not being used for its purpose I would start the timer over, or add a few minutes. When we returned to school in June my students would be reading for 20 minutes, I would check in and ask if they wanted more time and they always said yes! I was shocked. I had students that returned to school that did not enjoy reading in the traditional sense, but they absolutely loved reading on Epic!
I do believe that this is because they are able to switch to something else very quickly and easily if they find that they are not interested in what they are reading. This may not be the best for their reading endurance, but at least this way they are not constantly getting up and socializing with their friends along the way as they choose a new book. So I guess it was also a helpful classroom management tool 🙂
Using Epic! Books for kids App with French Immersion Kindergarten class. They loved the Read-to-Me feature, in French I might add!
I used this App to support reading as low as the Kindergarten level. It is so user friendly and having the ability to assign a collection of books allows the teacher to have a little bit of control instead of a free for all. The Kindergarten students really enjoyed the Read-to-me books and they were super engaged. I know that this is in part that they were in front of a screen, but they were still tracking and listening, which is what we want to see in emerging readers. I think that this is highly important when creating resources for teachers.
The web allows us to do amazing things, “You create some sort of web tool that students can refer to when you’re working with a different teacher and another teacher comes to you at the same time.” (Fontichiaro & Oehrli, 2014, p. 38)’ Having this access is a game changer for classes who may be working on similar inquiries. Having a resource like this could allow several classes to be studying the same novel without having to purchase the book, or several classes could be working on the same Inquiry project and the TL would not have to worry about running out of resources.
As mentioned in my video, if I am to move into a Learning Commons position, I could see myself using this App a lot while collaborating with teachers. It is a great resources for any type of inquiry as it offers both books and videos for the students to learn from. If teachers wanted students to stick to a general theme of their inquiry, I could also help curate a collection, or maybe several collections of books and videos that would suit the inquiry.
