Here's My Scoop

       I have been taking library courses at UBC one at a time over the past 4 years; all the while I have been in the same school library.  This has worked out well for my own personal learning, as inspiring ideas and changes get implemented as I learn about them.  It isn’t just the actual learning in the courses, but some ideas presented in them that have become part of my practice and some ideas have become springboards for the exploration of new learning. It helps being new as a TL, as the learning curve is steep and quick and you can’t help but start to network and learn!  Also, it helps that the TL position itself is changing from that old school “shushing” librarian.

Retrieved from:
https://www.pinterest.ca/suziholler/shhh/?lp=true

One way I started supporting my own learning since becoming a TL is through collaboration with colleagues.  Every different teacher I work with results in a change in my personal learning.  I am slowly gaining the collaboration confidence of more and more teachers on my staff as time goes by and plan to have this continue for myself, fellow staff, and our learning community.  I may have mentioned previously that I am part of a TL inquiry group that began when we were all taking courses to become librarians.  We naturally were drawn together because of our coursework, but were able to make library plans and make change through the acquisition of an inquiry grant through our school district.  We started on a journey to change our libraries to library learning commons.  This small group of four (Others are joining us this year.  We are year 3 – yippee!) have all made great progress in our own libraries, with ourselves, have started a TL LSA, and advocated at the board level for TLs.  Our vision evolves as we implement changes.  We have new goals for this year plus long term visions and are happy to be making connections with neighbouring districts and with fellow TLs (our LSA coming alive has helped with this) within our district, which has proven to be great networking.

      There are a couple of areas I hope to improve on which will help my personal learning.  First, I have started working at ways to efficiently curate resources both for my use, fellow colleague use, and student use.  It gets overwhelming with the plethora of ideas and resources out there and to keep on top of it all in an organized way will help me use them more and be able to share them out.  I started using Scoop.it! ,

Retrieved from:https://www.scoop.it/media-kit

but I admit I have neglected it.  With my goal of having my whole school doing an inquiry project on one topic, I hope to get my Scoop.it active again.  Another area deserving some attention for me is my school library website.  I want it to be a way to share out student learning.  I think it will help connect me to my learning community, from parents to students.  Although the sharing of successful teaching experiences does not automatically guarantee effective learning and teaching, it helps to develop a knowledge base for teaching that is more applicable to real educational settings (So, Pow, and Hung, 2009, p. 775).  Ideally in my perfect world with spare time my teaching blog could be linked from the library page and yes…gasp…maybe even an active twitter account!  Yang (p.11, 2009) speaks of how blogs allow people to exchange information without space and time constraints, to broaden their knowledge, and to meet personal needs and interests at the same time.  A more interactive website is a win-win for everyone.  One day my curated resources will be linked to the page, in addition other social network options would be good links to add.  I have a couple of people in the district which would be good support for web design and the site has potential to keep me growing in my own learning and definitely is a way to share out! 

References

Scoop.it - Content Curation Tool | Scoop.it. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.scoop.it/

So, W.W.m., Pow, J.W.c. & Hung, V.H.k. (2009). The Interactive Use of a Video Database in Teacher Education: Creating a Knowledge Base for Teaching through a Learning Community. Computers & Education, 53(3), 775-786.

Yang, S.-H. (2009). Using blogs to enhance critical reflection and community of practice. Educational Technology & Society, 12(2), 11-21.