Going 1:1
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The collaborative work I was involved with applied technology use to applying what we know as pedagogical best practice:
Equipped with powerful software, students can sometimes produce distracting, colorful, dizzying projects that obfuscate instead of enhance their message. So I also taught lessons in design and provided rubrics and checklists so that their PowerPoints and Photo Stories communicated their learning well and served better as assessments. We needed to reassure our parents that we were providing students a kid-friendly approach that enhanced cyber-safety. I helped students find efficient means of locating images on the web to support their projects-- means that provided the filtering for cyber-safety in order that parents stay behind our work. Our team provided parent workshops, and through collaboratively written research projects, we succeeded in dramatically increasing our use of the library's expensive subscription databases such as Grolier, World Book Online and Ebsco. Publishing on the Internet
'Know' instead of 'No'
As students became bloggers and teachers were presenting more and more of the learning opportunities in their online classroom spaces and Google Sites, we needed to develop a commitment and ability to model responsible use. I authored a Copyright Information and Citation Tools Web site and shared it with all departments to help our faculty understand copyright issues and model responsible use. (I also presented this work at an International Librarians' Conference in Taiwan.)
The librarians have often played the role of “copyright police,” but we also showed clear leadership as the “party of know” instead of “the party of no.” We helped students and faculty develop the skills for citation, for directing students to the authoritative web-based resources that we had subscribed to (so that teachers didn't need to scan and illegally post copyrighted works) and we eschewed clip-art in favor of skilling kids to create original imagery that could be posted on the web. We learned about, joined and actively promote the Creative Commons movement to make it easier to share creative work without fear of copyright infringement. These efforts actually tended to push critical thinking and writing and tech skills to a higher level. Using software tools for movie-making, I posted many of my lessons on the web to reinforce skills instruction I had provided in class. Doing so gave to our (sometimes doubtful) parents a look inside our work with students. It helped them to appreciate the difference that the expensive hardware was making for learning. It also helped students to review the steps we'd taught them in class, and provided Resource Teachers the means of reinforcing skills instruction. My online portfolio has quite a number of web sites that show how we integrated a new research model (employing The Big6) to scaffold and sequence the learning in long research projects. Embedded in those are many videos, handouts and skills lessons I crafted. Like George Lucas, Teacher-Librarians should be in the movie-making business for education. |