Much like my feelings about ICT in terms of my own growth, I feel ambivalent about the need to make this area a primary aspect of my work either, as a classroom teacher of teacher-librarian. That being said, I know that a sizable part of my job in terms of supporting classroom work will involve research and tools from the technological world and that there is a definite need for someone to act as a reservoir of knowledge and tools about how to best use ICT in the service of my school’s staff and students.

My ideas for how to support my school’s teaching community with their ICT needs, are fairly straight forward.

1. Consult – As part of a go-around to all departments, I would ask departments if they have any departmental or specific needs that I could help with. These needs could really be anything but I imagine many will be about accessing specific information or tools for their students, training resources for their own professional development and, perhaps, mini lessons about what ICT tools are available to us through our district or elsewhere in the on-line universe.

2. Dig – As I explore on-line resources myself (see previous blog), I will keep an eye put for tools that are useful for me and my colleagues but also for tools that I can see would be helpful for my colleagues or students that don’t have a utility to me.

3. Share – I would then note which discoveries that would be of use to either my co-workers or students and then make them part of my supporting work. I can imagine reserving 5-10 minutes per staff meeting to introduce a new tool or ICT-based idea to help inform my staff of the possibilities. I would also look for opportunities to work with any of my colleagues on ICT related projects.

4. Resource – I would also continue our current teacher-librarian’s policy of support resources by sponsoring book clubs for teachers and maintaining a virtual and hard copy library of resources for the staff of our school.

As I look over my blogs on this subject, I feel a bit embarrassed in that my ambitions, at least at this point, are pretty humble. I have tried, in the past, to keep up with and use a variety of social media and other internet resources to augment my teaching but have, largely, found that the amount of time it takes to master and maintain these formats, often made them quite expensive in terms of time in relation to their true usefulness. Key to my exploration of ICT is the idea of being conscious about how much of my practice becomes subsumed by these tools and which aspects of the ICT world are really are worth the effort to bring them to a larger audience.