LIBE 477 - Inquiry Blog #3: Supporting Teachers’ ICT Curriculum and Pedagogy: On-going Professional Development

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TL Captain's Blog. Startdate 2020.301.

LIBE 477 - Inquiry Blog #3: Supporting Teachers’ ICT Curriculum and Pedagogy: On-going Professional Development



In our district, we have something called PLC (professional learning communities) that meet each Monday for an hour after early dismissal. This is supposed to be collaboration time with other staff on common goals that are set out at the beginning of the year and take the form of an inquiry. 

I have always joined another inquiry that I've been interested in and never headed one on my own. After finishing this course, and completing my website on the inquiry research process, I feel that I will have many things to share with my staff around inquiry, accessing resources, the types of resources that our district has, and fun and new presentation websites and apps for student and teacher use. 

Once I get into a LC, I would like to host weekly PLC's around those topics to help teachers become comfortable with what we have, how to access it and a few new ICTs. 

The following list of topics are things that I would focus on and explore with my staff. Some I have used and others I have heard good things about, but eventually I would like to become familiar enough with them all to be able to help other teachers learn how to use them. 



The first topic that I would share with my staff would be the above infographic from the Surrey Teacher Librarian's Association about Teacher-TL collaboration and what it could look like. I feel like many teacher's don't know what a TL does, or can do, so that would be a great place to start building those connections and relationships before we move on to other topics. 



Destiny Library catalogue



  • Many staff don't know how to access or search for a book in the library catalogue. I'm always happy to look up books for staff, however, I'm sure many staff would appreciate being able to look for a book themselves. Destiny allows us to search within our library, but also within every library in the district, so it gives staff more options than just searching the shelves in the learning commons. 


Destiny Discover



  • Destiny Discover is a visual and amazing way to access the library catalogue. I feel like Discover is a very appealing and user friendly way to locate books. It reminds me of the Netflix, Amazon books, or Chapters interface with different categories of books displayed on the landing page, and I think that staff and students would respond well to it. 


Destiny Discover Collections





  • Destiny Discover Collections is one of my favourite websites for curation. Unfortunately, since I'm not a TL anymore, I'm not able to continue curating books, websites and multimedia for lessons. I would like to discuss the ability for teachers to access this curation tool in our district, not just librarians. But for now, I would show teachers how to access Collections, and browse collections that have already been created by other TLs.

More on Destiny Discover Collections from a librarian with great ideas here.



Professional Resources Collection catalogue



  • Our district has been building its professional and aboriginal resource collection for some time, and has an impressive array of books and resources to access. The ability to access this collection will have a huge impact on teacher planning, as there are many more multimodal resources available than just what is on the library shelves. Again, this is a hugely helpful catalogue to know how to access, especially for schools with part-time TLs where staff don't have access to a TL to request books (from the library or the professional collection) whenever they need. Knowing how to access this allows them to request books at any time. 



District's ERAC databases




  • Since many teachers don't know how to access the library catalogue, many of them won't be aware of the district's subscription to the ERAC collection of databases and encyclopedias. Aside from knowing how to get to this site, I will also show staff how to sign in and access the websites for both teachers and students. 




  • I haven't been able to play around on Jamboard too much, but from what I've seen it seems like a really cool collaboration, sharing, teaching, presenting, and brainstorming tool! It works with the G-Suite for Education, which our district has, so we can also use it in Google Classroom and for teaching lessons. I can't wait to learn more about this as I use it to teach this year, so that I can share what I know with my staff.  



  • I have just begun to play around with Piktochart, and I LOVE it. I enjoy easy to use drag-and-drop creation websites, and I find that I gravitate more and more to infographics for wanting to display information. Teachers can use Piktochart to present key lesson material in infographics, create lessons similar to Powerpoint, and have students create presentations or use them as study sheets for exams. Though, I'm sure my staff can think of 100 more ways to use it...

Blogger



  • I chose Google Blogger as one of the tech lessons because, again, it is part of our G-Suite district accounts and is easily integrated with Drive and Classroom, etc. Many teachers have taken to blogs to share lessons and have discussions, so I would like to give a quick example to my staff on how they can very easily do that if they are interested! I know there are many blogging platforms available, but I thought that Blogger was a simple way to start. 


Code.org



  • I love Code.org and have been using it, and its Hour of Code, to introduce students to computer science and coding for several years. Since the introduction of computational thinking and the ADST curriculum, coding has been something that many teachers have learned and taught their students, but I know that coding still intimidates many. I want to walk my staff through how simple coding is with this website and how students practically teach themselves once you get them going! There is so much to learn on here and they just added an app creation tutorial, which I am very excited to explore. The Hour of Code is a great place for staff and students to start to learn.




Weebly




  • I've created numerous websites with Weebly and find it a simple drag-and-drop website creation that still creates beautiful websites. I've tried other website builders, but I always come back to Weebly, so I feel that it's the best place for me to start teaching my staff about easy website creation. 

Google sites




  • Google Sites is another website creator that I've used and found straight forward. It doesn't have as many features as Weebly, so it creates more basic websites, but it's very quick and easy to use. It is also part of the G-Suite for Education and allows seamless integration of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Classroom, so it would be useful for teachers who want a simple way to create a site that links with their other web tools.



Glogster




  • I am not very familiar with Glogster, as I have only played around on it to see its features, so it is something that I would like to dig deeper into before I teach the lesson on it. I know that a way to create a visually stunning poster/presentation that incorporates multimodal resources such as text, images, audio, and video, which would be a wonderful way for students to demonstrate their learning about a topic.
Image Source. Created by Emmajane99. 




Animoto


  • Animoto is another web tool that I haven't used much, however, it gives you the ability to easily create videos using a combination of images, video clips, text, and audio. Animoto would be a great way to create an engaging lesson, have students create a video for their final presentation on their inquiry project, or to summarize their learning of a unit. 


Padlet


  • Padlet is probably the closest thing that I've found to Destiny Discover, as it's a visual bookmarking site that displays an image to represent a link, video, image, doodle, location, or file with a description of it. Unfortunately, you can only have 3 padlets on the free account, which limits the topics that you can create padlets for, however, if you set the padlet up as a shelf, it allows you to have multiple categories within the same padlet. Teachers could use this for curation for lessons, projects, or assignments. 


Symbaloo




  • Symbaloo is a curation and bookmarking tool that I have heard much about. I don't use it often, as I compare everything to Destiny Collections. However, Symbaloo is a great way to curate links for lesson plans, curriculum topics, or professional development. Teachers can also use the learning paths on different topics to find resources to use in their lessons or have students work their way through the path.

Scribbr


  • Scribbr is a free online citation generator for teachers to introduce to students. It doesn't have a detailed list of the "why" like some of the other sites, however, it is clean of ads and easy to use for citation generation. Students will need to check over the citation, however, as sometimes the autofill generator makes mistakes and adds extra information.



MindMup



  • MindMup is a free online mind mapping tool that lets you create a mind map without signing up, and allows you to download the mind map in pdf or image format, unlike other mind mapping websites out there. It's great for lesson planning, showing connections for lessons, and teaching students to use for inquiry or research projects. 










References

Surrey Teacher Librarian's Association (BCTLA).  (December 17, 2019). "What can collaboration with a teacher-librarian look like?" British Columbia Teacher Librarian's Association.  Retrieved from: https://surreychapterofthebctla.com/2018/12/17/what-can-collaboration-with-a-teacher-librarian-look-like/

Comments

  1. Alison MackleyOctober 27, 2020 at 11:11 AM

    Hello Linneae

    We have been using Follett Destiny for three years and I am gradually figuring out all of the intricacies . This year I finally managed to get all of our staff member accounts created so that they could log in and search the catalogue. We made great use of our time without students at the end of the last school year, and cleaned up several resources spaces and combined them into one. We also made collections as we went which is great for the teachers, but they are underutilized. We have done some experimenting and I believe that if teachers are logged in they should be able to create their own collections. I did double check with one of our teacher accounts, and the collections feature is available on the drop down menu in the top left hand corner. Once you select the collections tab, you will see public collections from the school and if you select "private" at the top of the page you can create your own collection. Teachers may need to guidance in how to do this, but it is completely possible.

    Our district also pushed a Follet Icon onto every SD computer, which makes getting in one step easier.

    Alison

    ReplyDelete
  2. D.McNeeOctober 29, 2020 at 9:13 PM

    You share so many good ideas, tools and strategies to support other teachers here. There are many excellent takeaways for your reader. I agree that the document from Surrey is an excellent source to share-out with others.

    ReplyDelete
  3. CaaityOctober 30, 2020 at 9:36 PM

    I love this idea of PLCs and am wishing that we had something like this in our school with an early dismissal day. Has this been done in your school for long?
    The tech tools that you have shared are really interesting and I am excited to explore them more deeply. There are so many tools out there so I appreciate your curation that you have included.

    ReplyDelete

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