Pause (Inquiry Blog 5)

 

"What are your key takeaways, learning and direction after all this exploration? What are the new avenues for development in your personal and professional practice? What are you going to take with you, moving forward from your own explorations and also from the explorations of others in this class? If you could pick just one topic from Phase 2 that resonated with you, which is it and why?"

- Inquiry Blog Post 5, LIBE 477B, UBC 

Phew! I can’t answer all those questions in one blog post…but I’m hoping to touch on parts of all of them. I have come up with four takeaways from the last four weeks of the course:

1 - I was surprised to learn that I am interested in how to choose and lead effective professional development! It’s not an area that I have been drawn to in the past. I might actually enjoy being part of the pro-d committee!

2 - We are very lucky to have the amount of resources that we do. There are many places out there without any books, let alone internet and ways to access it. Good people are working hard to improve this situation, using vans, donkeys, buses and boxes with fancy satellite connections, as written about by Suzanne Bartel (2023). Sometimes their efforts work well, and sometimes they don’t (Haymen Leong, 2023). I appreciated the reminder that most Canadian schools have a lot of resources.

Screenshot from @LondonPublicLibary, Nov. 3, 2023.

3 - Social media is great for professional development! I recently learned via my shiny new X account that Wednesday, November 8 is #IReadCanadian Day. I’m a classroom teacher, so I headed to the school library last week and hunted down a box full of books by Canadian authors. I plan to share them with my Grade 3/4s next Wednesday. I hadn’t paid much attention to the nationality of children’s book authors and was happy to learn some favourites are Canadian - go Melanie Watt (Scaredy Squirrel) and Barbara Reid (Birds)! On the less positive side, I find time disappears when I am using social media. I blink and an hour is gone and I haven’t accomplished anything specific. Discipline is necessary to use X effectively. Having just started my X account, I am also disappointed to hear that the BCTLA will be retiring their X account and focusing on using Instagram/Facebook. I don’t have the time to interact with multiple platforms!

4 - I’ve enjoyed this format of learning! I learn more with a group of people all researching, writing, commenting and discussing than I do when I just think about a topic on my own. Blogs are much more flexible than the Canvas platform, and I like following the links, pictures and videos everyone has added. We created a PLN. I understand it’s a forced one, because we’re all taking the same course, but it’s a pretty great way to learn. I hope to keep in touch!

Moving forward, I want to try putting the ideas we’ve been discussing into practice.

Images from Laura Robinson, 2023.

I am going to bring more opportunities to develop digital literacy skills into my Grade 3/4 classroom. I already tried an online research project (see pictures above). It was a flipbook containing facts students had found about local landforms. I learned that my students are very easily distracted by all the other things that computers offer. I had students taking photos of themselves, googling their names, etc. Clearly, I need to set better expectations about what the computers are to be used for. The research part also took a lot longer than I thought it would. My students got there eventually, but I see several potential ways to make the process more efficient! Next, I want to try out either Powerpoint book recommendations or Padlet.

Additionally, I’m going to maintain my X account. I’m learning new information (see previous comments about #IReadCanadian) and finding more local TLs to follow every time I check it, although I have developed some FOMO because I’m not on every social media platform (see previous comments about BCTLA and Instagram). I’ve discovered that many of the names I was thinking of changing my X name to are taken (LauratheLibrarian, LRobinson, etc). I tried to change my name (twice!) and ran into separate technical issues each time, but I finally got it figured out. I haven't posted anything, so it's not very interesting yet, but my official new name is @MsRobinson_TL.

The next phase of the course is our Final Vision Project. As I’m leaving this phase with a new X account, I’m wondering if the X account I’m developing might turn into my final project. I originally thought I was going to develop a website for my school library, but I’m really enjoying exploring professional development via social media. I can see I’ll be thinking more about this over the next week. Stay tuned!

Works Cited:

Bartel, S. "Mobile Libraries in Kabul." A Learning Journey, Wordpress, October 26, 2023, suzannebartel.wordpress.com/2023/10/26/mobile-libraries-in-kabul-inquiry-4/. Accessed Nov. 4, 2023.

Leong, H. "Mobile, Financial, and Information Literacy through Public Libraries to Alleviate Poverty in Gujarat, India." LIBE 477B 63A 2023W1, Wordpress, October 25, 2023, blogs.ubc.ca/haymenleong/2023/10/25/mobile-financial-and-information-literacy-through-public-libraries-to-alleviate-poverty-in-gujarat-india-inquiry-blog-4/. Accessed Nov. 4, 2023.

@LondonPublicLibrary. "Start celebrating #IReadCanadian Day with our list of Canadian books for young people. Borrow them instantly until Nov 12th at: lpl.overdrive.com." X, Nov. 3, 2023, twitter.com/londonlibrary/status/1720429632548167838. Accessed Nov. 4, 2023.