LIBE 477 Assignment 1: 

Reading Review Part A

As I read ‘Leading from the Library: Help your School Community Thrive in the Digital Age’, I have been reflecting on what I have learned about best practice during previous courses and considering my own strengths and weaknesses. One weakness that I keep coming back to is advocacy, not only for the library program, but for the learning that is happening through the program.

As fortunate as I am to work in a school that values collaboration, and  as respected as I am by colleagues, there is still a huge misconception amongst staff and leadership surrounding what my role is and what a Future Ready Library program can offer.  In my attempts to not take over the role of our Tech coaches, I have neglected this entire area of my role, and this neglect is evident in how I share student learning.  I realise it is not enough to encourage the use of digital tolls to support my students, I also need to reflect their use in my own practice.

I work with the youngest students in my school, our three to seven year olds.  They have an incredible amount of knowledge to share, and their curiosity and wonder is both inspiring, and challenging to capture in a way that accurately reflects their excitement and wonder.  I am very quick to share my observational notes or anecdotes with their class teachers as I see them, but I am realising their is much more strength in sharing the photos and videos I take.  

I believe that through the use of presentation tools such as Adobe Spark, Canva, or even IMovie, I could strengthen my documentation to capture their learning and make more direct links to learning outcomes we are looking for as teachers, and directly show how I support the whole school curriculum. By developing my skills with these tools, I hope to work more efficiently so that my documentation is completed in a more timely manner.

I think this could be further enhanced by  sharing this documentation on seesaw, where the students' parents and even the students themselves can view it.  I also wonder how this could be shared within the physical library space so that students can view each others thoughts.  With the rise in QR code use due to the pandemic, I wonder if something like this would work within the library. 

We want our program to be child-led and responsive to the students' interests, and the technology we have access to would allow students to respond to their thinking, but how often do we actually share this back with them?  Posters of documentation look very nice in the classroom, but if I work with children who are not reading independently, how useful is this documentation to them? 

I am curious to learn more about how documentation has been digitized to be shared with a wider audience to support and enhance student learning.   There are so many inspirational librarians working to advocate for their students and their program, I need to begin to follow their lead and advocate for my own.

Works Cited:

Miller, S., & Bass, W. (2019).  Leading from the Library: Help your School Community Thrive in the Digital Age. International Society for Technology in Education.

Shannon McClintock Miller https://vanmeterlibraryvoice.blogspot.com/