Tag: inquiry

Posted on

LIBE 477B – My vision or rant? Take it how it is!

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. 

Posted on

LIBE 477B – Inquiry 1 – Fostering a Reading Culture

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.

Works Cited:

Fontichiaro, K. & Oehrli, J. A. (2014a). Nudging toward inquiry – Turning the tables on collaboration part I: Planning for success. Library Media Connection 32(4): 36-38.