As a teacher at a Unicef Chartered Rights Respecting School, Chartwell Elementary in West Vancouver, I am personally connected to the issue of human rights and equality. The topic of World Libraries is new to me, but one that is fitting with the culture of my school. Chartwell has a high number of English Language Learners (ELL), as well as a high transient population. Many Asian families who are moving to the Vancouver area choose our school because of our reputation for being a place of acceptance and cultural promotion. We boast one of the highest percentage of second and third languages in the province, and with those numbers comes a culturally diverse population of learners. This year we had students whose families came from 26 countries, who spoke 22 languages! This in a school of 243 students.

I really connected with the TedTalks video of Sugata Mitra on our class blog today; and found another to share here, Build a School in the Cloud is a winner of this year’s $1M Ted Prize. Yet another leader provoking conversation about school change! The following article, from June 15, 2013, was posted in our school’s Yammer networking site. The connections between ICT, school reform, equity, inquiry, and linguistic cognitive domain continue to grow!

At first I wondered why this video was related to the topic of World Libraries, and then something Sugata Mitra said struck a chord with me: IC4IT. I googled the phrase ‘information technology for international development’ and found a link to the topic as well as the journal that supports this field of learning. From Wikipedia,

District and Community ICT Connections

For this assignment, I will share the various district ICT resources I am currently connecting with.

1. SharePoint tabs: Modernization, Innovation Teams (*grant application), Collaborative Sites

2. Yammer (Social Enterprise Network): WVTL group

3. Colleagues: Pinterest, Live Binder It, Inquiry examples

4. West Vancouver Memorial Library: application to Board, Trustee

As a first year Teacher Librarian, I have found a wealth of information on my own district website. We TLs are encouraged (by our superintendent, principals, directors of technology and instruction) to be learning leaders in our schools. Inquiry and Technology are key focus points in many of our school goals. This is a timely position, because of the Ministry of Education’s emphasis on 21st Century Learning and Educational Change and the connections we have to literacy and ICT with all staff and students.



On our district website, there are several places to collaborate: email distribution lists (teacher librarians is one, my school is another), collaborative team sites (linked to wikis and shared folders), modernization and innovation team sites (for which there is grant funding*). This year I have used all of these areas to collaborate with various staff, but the best resource is an outside link to a social networking site called Yammer. After being invited to join our district group on Yammer, I was able to create a TL group where we could share website and video links, upload documents, photos, and presentations. We found it more powerful and user-friendly than our SharePoint spaces. It was here that we collaborated on a presentation we made to our school board for our vision of Learning Commons last Fall. The most interesting thing about Yammer may be how it came about. I became aware of it last Fall when I was invited by a tech team member, but other teachers are finding their district already has a group just by signing up for an account and searching. Interesting. I wonder if this is a MoE incentive or if (as suggested by Meryn) a group of teachers learned about it at a conference, and created groups for their districts.



*This coming year, some of us TLs are applying for an innovation grant to practice Inquiry methods (to better support our staff and students), as shown in my presentation.



I have really appreciated connecting with my colleagues in my ICT endeavors, and one person in particular I have learned a lot from was my grade 7 teaching partner. One great bookmarking site she showed me is Live Binder It. A link to this site sits on my toolbar, and when I want to add a website to my collections of binders, I click on this link. Another person I connected with during this course was a former colleague, now working at an International School. She has shared a few lesson plans with me that highlight the use of Inquiry.
Gandhi_Mao_SS9_Atlas Rubicon 6.10

One new connection I am seeking out is a partnership with my local library in the capacity of a Board member. I have submitted an application this week for this! West Vancouver Memorial Library I believe this library demonstrates ICT and literacy leadership as demonstrated by their recent renovation of the teen space, Room 14 (for teen).

After class today, Lisa and I worked on our Inquiry project: TLs helping teachers with Inquiry. Because of the nature of Inquiry, we felt it would be appropriate to ‘collaborate’ using one of the online tools we have been learning about in class.

We reviewed Storify (great to gather info but hard to organize), Mind Meister (collaborative, but visually limited), Pearltrees (collaborative, but can become ‘busy’ with the many links), and Popplet (nice clean look, but limited ability to include data). I will continue to add links to my Mindmeister map for now, but I may rethink this over the next few days…

Lisa and I then shared our progress on upcoming assignments. We compared notes on book selection, email and online tools. We got to know each other a little better and brainstormed about the need for a collaborative Teacher Librarian online space. I remembered a space I had used earlier in the year, Yammer, and showed Lisa my own district TL space. Lisa showed me her (First Class?) space which looked great, but her district’s website is undergoing a change and it may no longer be available. I advocated for Yammer as being a safe, intuitive way to collaborate professionally in a fairly organized space, and suggested we invite her to my group. But first, Lisa searched for her district, and presto – she found a couple members, her district Tech team! She then signed up for her district’s group. This may be a provincial wide network, but it is so new, that Lisa is only the third member of her district to join! Since Lisa and I operate in different areas of the province, we thought it would be really ‘smart’ to find/create an open space for all BCTLs so we created a general Teacher Librarian group: BCTLs. I wonder if Yammer is used province wide, and if other members of this class have created TL groups for their district?

Connection to today’s class discussion:
Interesting to note, it was our engagement with our environment (working on tasks), modifications to the environment (technological pathways to seek a better fit), and communication (collaborating with each other) that allowed us to progress through the task and come to a higher level of understanding of our task.

After our discussion today, two things became clear to me:
1. I need to apply for an Innovation Grant for a Teacher Librarian Inquiry project
2. I need to dialogue with my superintendent (email, tweet) about other districts who are not reporting letter grades this year (the discussion for this will follow in a subsequent post)

First, I went to our district website and found the grant application for a Learning Team. Several TLs in my district are interested in forming a Learning Team for the 2013/14 school year to : explore ways in which Teacher Librarians can lead/assist teachers and students in Inquiry Projects. My goal for the end of this week is to fill out the application form on behalf of our TL group, and send it to the others for editing. When this is done, I will submit it to the Grant Committee.

After filling out an application, we need to commit to the following:

1. Attend a Facilitators’ Workshop

2. Collect baseline data

3. Work over the course of the year on a key question

4. Assess progress and plan for “Next Steps”

5. Attend six meetings annually to facilitate, plan, explore, and share inquiry focused projects (maintain minutes of these meetings for submission at project’s end)

6. Answer the Questions:

How is this project Innovative?
Who was involved in the project?
What happened as the project unfolded?
How does this fit with school/district/professional goals?

Many of our schools have a goal to teach with Inquiry next year; TLs should be supporting teachers and students as we take on this goal. An Innovation Grant will support us in this endeavor by providing release time (up to $3500 per team). Along with our passion and talents for 21st Century teaching and learning, this support time will help our team achieve our goal. I believe it it through projects such as this that we will continue to define and support the role of teacher librarians as learning leaders in schools.

Reflection:
I consider this time in education to be revolutionary:
we have new understandings about brain research and how we learn
we have the technological ability to research and present information on anything
we have a right to use our knowledge and advances to learn and teach better
we are in the position to lead an educational change
we have an obligation to use our knowledge to make the world a better place

Source: www.sd45.bc.ca

Today we met in our small group (Sandy, Karen, Jennifer, Harj and Doni) to discuss How TLs Can Help Teachers with Inquiry-Based Teaching. We have varying levels of understanding and expertise amongst us, so spent some time defining Inquiry and how it could be used in our role as teacher librarians. We came up with a set of questions (our plan) which will help focus us, and placed that on a mind map on Mind Meister. This Mind Map will serve as a place for us to share our ideas on this topic, and from here we can create a plan to achieve our goals.

Other websites that may come in handy for this assignment (because they can be used to gather ideas form people and organize those ideas) are:
Twitter, Storify, Live Binder It, Pinterest, and Pearltrees
One thing that keeps coming up in this course is how to use ICT to do things better (or in different ways). I am trying very hard to learn new ways of doing things, in part so I can share with my teachers and students, because we all learn differently. As a TL, I want to support the staff, students and parents in my school.

Inquiry Based learning is important to me because it capitalizes on students’ innate desire to learn. It also allows for individualized learning, flexibility and the integration of technology, three key concepts of 21st Century Learning as outlined in BC’s Education Plan. This new plan designed by the provincial government to meet the changing needs of our learners, allows for more freedom from the traditional curriculum. Although still in it’s planning stages (with an ongoing call-out for blog contributions), I believe this Plan is a step in the right direction, to changing the way we teach and learn in the today’s environment. Here is a draft template of how the Language Arts 10 course will look:

As I understand it, Inquiry Based learning encourages students to explore an idea across multiple curricular areas, work as part of a team of learners, and use various technologies to research concepts related to a Guiding Question. What I hope to gain from this assignment, from working with a dedicated group of learners, is to understand how to create an Inquiry for a concept that I can use with my teachers. I want to be able to help teachers generate a guiding question, map out a plan of activities that ensure enduring understandings, and provide meaningful presentation and reflection opportunities.