TL Captain's Blog: my learning journey

TL Captain's Blog. Stardate 2020.331. Discoveries, Connections, & Take Aways This has been one of my favourite courses of my diploma. The way the lessons are laid out, with multimodal resources included as readings, have made this course very engaging. The topics and readings were interesting and relevant. It was a very tangible way to see the positive effects of integrating multimodal resources into lessons. I would say that my overarching take aways are the use of multimodality for engagement, information, and inspiration , as well as the integration of new and exciting technologies to support lessons and the development of literacy skills and information literacy skills.   (Beirut, 2017)                                                                         ...

TL Captain's Blog. Stardate 2020.330. StirlingLibsAndArchives Image Source Evaluation &  Rationale for Improvement "Without an excellent school library functioning  as a learning commons, students are severely  disadvantaged. Students need to be working  with the best technologies and resource collections available. They require expert instruction  and guidance to become sophisticated users of  information and ideas in our complex world.  To meet their learning potential and participate  fully as successful learners and contributors our  students need learning opportunities and new  environments deliberately designed to engage  and inspire."   ( Canadian Library Association, 2014 , p. 7)   Image Source An ongoing focus in the School Library Learning Commons is to teach our students how to be information literate citizens and 21st century learners.  The Canadian Association of School Libraries defines an informatio...

TL Captain's Blog. Stardate 2020.326 Reference Materials (Theme #3 reflection post) Lesson 8: Deep Web Whoa... This is a shift of perspective for me. Here I was going along, planning to teach my students about how search engines work, what constitutes a credible site for good information, how to search a database, etc. all the while thinking that Google offered us links to the Canadian Census page if students needed information on the population, or provided links to all of the scholarly articles that could be found if we search in a database, or at least provided us the link to the database that we they could search! I have been ill informed!  Reflecting on my own search process for university, I realize now that I didn't use Google much to access articles from journals in databases, I only used the direct Library database access. Even for those courses where my assignments required me to search the surface internet, I guess I assumed that Google Scholar was providing me with ...

 TL Captain's Blog. Stardate 2020.322. LIBE 477 - Vision for the Future Blog post 2: Learner Considerations Image Source Pixabay This final vision will mostly be for me as a place to gather the resources and lessons that I would want to teach my students as they go through the inquiry process, but it would also be a resource for those students to refer to, watch videos, and use the links as they do their research. Image Source Pixabay I have done quite a bit of academic research for my undergrad and while I am not an expert at it, I feel confident in what I am doing and how to do it. The process, however, entails so many minute details, so many steps, and so many things to remember that I always feel overwhelmed with what, and how best, to teach!  I worry that I won't be able to teach my students everything that they need to know for good research, due to the sheer volume of things that they need to do. I also worry that  they will make a mistake that could have been avoi...

TL Captain's Blog. Stardate 2020.319. LIBE 477 - Vision for the Future Blog post 1 For my final project, I am going to create a comprehensive website to guide the student inquiry process and curate all the resources to support that process in one place.  I find the inquiry and research process so vast and detailed that I am always concerned that I will miss a key piece to teach my students. Then they will all make that mistake and they will have to do things over, or I will end up with a class load of incorrect assignments. This website will help me to organize what I need to teach students and give me the resources required to do that, but it could also be a reference for students as they go through the process.  So far in my brainstorm, I have come up with the pages for the website. Each page will be a different stage of the inquiry process and are an amalgamation of The Points of Inquiry and The Big6 stages... depending on the language that I preferred. Within those main pa...