Just spent some time playing with Touchgraph, amazing, can't wait to show it to my grade 7 class, I am pretty sure that they have not used this yet so I may actually be able to impress them with my new "cool" feature. I love that it provides the link with your search.
I also customized my very own igoogle page, took me half the night but wow, love it!! My kids don't believe me when I say that I am doing my homework, looks like too much fun they say.
I must say that this course is reinforcing my decision to not put my very meager funds towards the purchase of non-fiction books. My small school collection can not and will never be able to compete with the mass information so easily available to this generation. Teaching the Dewey Decimal system seems so archaic, do they really need to know this?
I find myself or my school district in a very ironic situation. According to Christopher Harris's article, particularly, "where do we go from here" the general idea is that Librarians are crucial to aiding and supporting the use of the new technologies available. Our school district recently purchased laptops for the intermediate students and teachers in order to facilitate the teaching of new technology, the librarians, however, were not included. A little bizarre! We are supposed to embrace and encourage it but please do so without the hardware. I believe that this was a major oversight on behalf of the district but what can you do. I will continue to do as I always have and make the best of it, teach what I can with what I have. My point being that I agree with Harris and there is no denying the change, we need to move on and get with it and try to stay with it as best we can. Oh yeah and let's not forget to have fun, make mistakes and learn!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting question about whether kids even need to know the Dewey Decimal system. I would argue that they do--I think there is still a place for print materials and kids need to know how to access the print information in libraries (public, school, academic, etc.) just like they need to know how best to access electronic or digital information.
ReplyDeleteIt is very discouraging to hear that the TLs in your district did not get the same laptops that teachers and students did...does not send a strong message that TLs are important instructional leaders in the schools.