article 8: tech and lib

Techno Geek Brought Very Near.

This article is of an interview with highschool teacher librarian, Carolyn Foote who tells us about her roles and visions as a librarian in the 21st century.

  

Certainly we are hearing more and more about 21st century learners.  If you look up the term 21st learner in Google it will turn up over 18 million references.   As a future librarian  both Foote and I share a common opinion that being that the digital environment is one in which teachers need leaders to guide them toward available materials and technologies.  One of the roles as teacher librarin is to do just that.    Foote brings up the fact that "To think that libraries become obsolete because of technology defies logic" In fact today students are more in need of information literacy skills than ever before.

 

The Vancouver School Board even has a site started on this subject, although in my opinion it barely shows the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.vsb.bc.ca/21st-century-learning

Within this article I started to see a pattern with certain comments that many teacher librarians in various articles were saying. These include such things as :

 

1.making sure our administrators understand our role in terms of student instruction.

2. Understanding how students think and learn (since they are my "customers") and how to convey information to them has been key to me. 

3.being aware of designing a library environment that is respectful of ;and inviting to students 

4.Teacher collaboration is key to becoming more central to this process

 

A quote that I would like to take away from this interview, is the following:  "I find that I continue to become a better teacher by being a librarian, because the library is like a learning laboratory. I get so many opportunities to see other teachers in action, and I have the opportunity to try new practices and approaches myself when working with their classes."

A few other points

-enrich ourselves by becoming comfortable with new tools for collecting, creating, and dispersing information so that we can be teacher-leaders.

-how to deal with books

Foote ends her article by telling us her goals which include

-constantly reinforcing information literacy is for our students who are drowning in information yet don't necessarily have the skills to evaluate the multiplicity of choices on the web.

-And I want people to understand that librarians are teachers too-we are teacher-librarians.

- encourage teacher-librarians to continually rethink what they do and to be curious-not defensive-about change.

It's also an environment which raises many questions for teacher-librarians and our future practices-so I am constantly working on sorting out issues like building a virtual point of connection for students and how e-books may affect our library collection, for example.

I recently had the opportunity to go to a District Technology Day. I found it to be very rewarding and felt relieved that the VSB, like some of the advice in this article, was heading in the right direction by hosting such an event. 

 

Teacher Librarian; Dec2010, Vol. 38 Issue 2, p59-60, 2p