Ms. Bell's Book Blog

Digital Artifact – Week 2

Building a website can be complicated. There is a lot going on in the design part of it – what to keep, what to get rid of, what random pictures of cute puppies to use… I mean what deeply interesting, non-click bate will I use to keep my audience interested long enough to use this very useful site. (I realize this is sounding a little sarcastic, but I’m quite sincere. This website is mostly about useful function, and too often it feels like resources created for staff are used and then forgotten, so I want this resource to be continuously useful and used).

Having just alluded to the importance of designing a website to attract, retain and inform the audience is important, I haven’t got any great ideas here other than keeping it clutter free, easy to use, and logical. I need to do some more research here. After some really excellent discussion with my library partner, we’ve decided that our new tech website, “The Tech Drawer,” will be focused on providing information to our staff primarily. Staff may use the videos, links, info etc with their students, and will be able to link to any of the above on their own Google Classrooms, websites, etc. There are two needs we want to meet with The Tech Drawer:
1) create tutorials to remind staff of what we’ve covered in our Tech Ten sessions at Staff Meetings
2) provide links to helpful resources for their courses
When I informally surveyed the staff at the last staff meeting, they were very interersted in being able to access tutorials of the various tools, tips and sites. It is not always easy to remember details about interesting sites, especially if you don’t need to use that site or tool for a few months after it has been presented. It’s also nice for teachers to be able to show the tutorials to their students so they can get the information too (without the memory glitches).

So who is my intended audience? It is the 50 or so teaching colleagues at my school. Everyone is at a different place with their own tech skills or needs, but using video tutorials (I’m going to use Screencastify) will work for everyone. It’s easier for less tech savvy people when they can refer back to what the screen should look like and where to click. We do have some common places we use technology now, such as accessing the chromebook schedule or requesting laminating through our library learnings website, so linking our Tech Drawer to our LLC website will make things fairly congruous. I suspect that most of our tutorials will be useful for teachers wanting their students to do research / inquiry (a number of our Tech Ten presentations have been on our subscribed databases). In the future, we’d like to add more about different presentation platforms so we can find more creative ways to avoid slide shows! Along with building research / inquiry projects, we want to give teachers access to current, interesting articles via Twitter, in a location that makes it easy. This will be ideal for a teacher who isn’t a Twitter user, or doesn’t follow these various magazines / organizations on Twitter.

We also thought that since we were going to have this handy Tech Drawer website, that maybe we could have students make their own tutorials that they post to the website. One of our TA’s came up with a few suggestions that were great, and in a far different direction than what we had thought about. Her suggestions were tutorials on how to do different brush strokes for painting (she and another student just painted our windows for Rememberance Day), programming video games, electronic portfolios for our Careers students, and so on. Frankly, what a great idea! We have many tech savvy students, and so many with great tech devices at hand (couldn’t resist the pun) that we may as well capitalize on their strengths.

And where are we so far?

We’ve got a really rough sketch of what we want the website to do / look like. I’ve also got a short list of tutorial videos that I’ll be making based on our last couple of Tech Ten presentations.

I’ve also started putting together the Tweetdeck (something my TL partner is looking forward to playing with too!) so that I can embed the different collections into the pages for the various subjects. It’s really nice to finally see my vision of how I wanted to use Twitter taking shape! This was the one thing I wanted to figure out when I started the course.

Twitter Feeds + Tutorial Videos = Tech Webpage

There are a couple of things I wanted to achieve with this final project, things that I’ve had on my list for a while.

The first is now that I’ve started using Twitter and I see all of these great articles that I want to share with my colleagues, how can I take certain tweets and post them in individual subject areas so that they can follow, and retreive them later?

The second item on my list is to create tutorial videos of the Tech Ten and Lunch & Learn sessions that my library partner and I do monthly. The best way to make both of these happen is to create a website to store all of this.

I’m still working on a catchy name for it (suggestions welcome!):
The Tech Drawer
IDtenT Proof (though that’s probably not very nice)
ICYMI (not very original, I know… and I’ll have to explain it, but that’s not to bad)

Clever names aside, I’ve already surveyed the staff at the last staff meeting, and they’re interested in the idea. That’s a good start. Now where to begin? Fortunately, we have a great TL association, and at our last meeting (yesterday, so handy!) I probed the group brain and came up with a few suggestions for how do deal with the Twitter feeds.

One suggestion was to use Tweetdeck. I’ve checked out a couple of tutorial videos on YouTube, “How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts with Tweetdeck” which was pretty handy for helping me to figure out what the heck I might want to do with Tweetdeck, and “Create Twitter Collections” which had some really great specifics on what I might want to use collections for, how to build them and then how to embed them in a website – ultimately what I’m looking for. Another great resource they recommended is a local teacher who has great Twitter accounts: Jeremy Reid @jReidEdu. Nice to have someone to hopefully work with one-on-one.

For the tutorial videos I’ve used Screencastify before and it works well for me. The only problem is really just making the time, and making sure it’s quite. Hmmm… Friday after school sounds about right! Also a good time for setting a scary film in a school.

As for the look of the fancy tech website… um…

Hopefully I’ll have a better idea of what the layout and design of it should be for next week. Thinking that simple is good, cluttered is bad. Beyond that?

Works Cited
McMaster, Wade. “How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts with Tweetdeck.” YouTube.com, https://youtu.be/QEtvwgCO8yw
Maskan & Vero. “Create Twitter Collections.” YouTube.com, https://youtu.be/CILW_uxaBzQ

The last four weeks of exploration have been down done familiar roads, but as with every journey, there’s always something new to see or learn. I’m pretty comfortable with learning new technology and trying it out, but frankly, that’s had also been in large part thanks to working on the teacher – librarian diploma. Now that I am at the end of it, what, beyond my own curiosity, will keeping me moving forward and learning? I fall into the rut of doing the sane old thing because it is easy and it had worked. Every teacher faces this dilemma at some point – teaching just is busy! However, the world of technology doesn’t stop because I’m busy, and I fear that losing my mental flexibility and my practice of learning that I will find it very difficult to adapt in the not so distant future… much like I know that I really should haul out my yoga mat more than twice a year. I think that one of the best ways to avoid mental atrophy is to consider two important aspects from the last four weeks: help my colleagues with their development, and see what is going on in the world.

Last year I tried having after school sessions on how to build inquiry units. I was quite disappointed when only one person expressed interest. Now, the two of us did come up with a really neat inquiry unit, so it really was a positive venture, but in reflecting on that experience and in thinking about how to help promote / lead / facilitate professional development amongst my staff I realize that I was missing something very important: was that even what anyone was interested in learning?

Often I’ve found that assumptions made by administration, or well meaning pro-d organizers chaf because I already have those skills, or the skills I want developed are beyond that level. Not helpful to do the same. After considering this a while, I think I’ve come up with a few ideas that will be helpful.

• survey the staff – I get 10 minutes at every staff meeting for our Tech Ten, so why not make a quick online survey available to find out what people are actually interested in
• make the info available on our SLLC website – this is what I’m thinking of for my digital artifact. I can make short videos of the tech, or post articles or websites that will be helpful; this also allows me to post some of the great articles I’ve read over the last couple of years about inquiry, literacy, etc. in a place where people who are interested or curious will read them, and not just let it pile up on the desk or recycle it. This also means that if someone isn’t interested now, but is later, they will know where to come back to.
• keep snooping – I always advocate snooping and finding out what teachers are up to so that I can support them in their classrooms. Sometimes it leads to great team teaching!

The second aspect is to broaden my perspective. Too easily we focus on our class or our school. I had know idea that libraries without boarders even existed, and I bet that no one else at my school does either. Wouldn’t it be cool if we learned more about this and found ways to contribute as a staff? We always want our students to do this, but we don’t always do the same thing just amongst the staff. I think that it is really important to see what is going on, and working, outside of your area because it helps breathe new life, interest, or discussion into your current practice. Our school is focussing on the OECD principles, but sometimes it’s just really helpful to see how other schools, countries, or organizations are tackling similar goals.

I was really interested in this week’s topic of seeing what other libraries are doing with media, apps, and mobile tech.

The first thing that popped into my mind was Overdrive. I’m a huge fan of being able to read ebooks on the go, and to listen to audio books, especially since I often have road trips to make, or twice daily dog walks (my dog isn’t much of a conversationalist, so it helps pass the hours of walking we do). My last car didn’t have bluetooth, so I’ve been very excited about all of the books I can listen to with my new car. I haven’t yet made the switch to Libby (the new version), but it’s on my kids’ tablets and they love it. The best part about this is that I’m not limited to the books at my library since we are part of the BC Libraries Cooperative: Library2go and there are many more books in all of these collections that I can draw on. I may also maintain a library card from another very large Canadian city and have access to even more resources!

I frequently recommend this online option to students, especially when they are looking for audio versions of classroom novels (it’s taking us a bit of time to get our audio book collection established). But with every up, comes a down! Recently, the Ottawa Public Library sent a letter to patrons and talked with CBC asking for patrons to sign a protest against MacMillan Publishers for severly limiting how many ebooks public libraries (only 1 copy!) can purchase for new releases. This is terrible for all of the people who rely on public libraries as their main source of information. Not everyone can afford to buy their own copy of every book they want to read – and nor should they have to in my humble opinion.

In a different direction, I was also interested to see what other libraries were offering for mobile apps. One of the first sites I stumbled upon was a software company that dedicated to libraries and their needs. Their article “5 Ways Library Mobile Apps Make Life Easier for Everyone” got me thinking about how a library mobile app can be more than an ebook / audiobook reader. There were the obvious ones that I completely overlooked like checking on your account any time, anywhere. I do this all the time myself, though from a web browser. It was the second one that really caught my interest: Free, Local events are easier to discover. I’m always looking for ways to get people involved in our library learning commons events. This is definitely something I need to look into and there are certainly a lot of different apps out there I could use!

Then I looked at two very differently sized libraries: the Thompson-Nicola Regional Library (my home public library) and the Toronto Public Library. I found that both library systems had similar mobile apps or online databases for ebooks & magazines (rb digital and Tumblebook), language learning (Rocket or Mango), and then a whole bunch more for learning various things like mechanics, listening to music (Naxos) or streaming movies / TV (Hoopla & Kanopy) and other neat things. While I don’t think that my school library learning commons is financially capable of doing all of that, it does remind me that we were wanting to find a way to make our magazine subscriptions available online, so perhaps one of these apps will work!

A lot of people talk about how easy and natural it is to engage in inquiry learning when we are interested in something. I do this all the time, to bigger or lesser degrees: fixing things, researching items I want to buy, researching random questions like why the sky is blue or some other interesting but irrelevant, time wasting question.

The tricky part is engaging with colleagues to help enhance their pro-d, and ours. All the time we find new tools, or rediscover old tools that we know teacher x and y would really benefit from, but how to engage them. After 15 years of teaching, I feel like this is harder to answer than ever. I feel busier, and so do my colleagues. However, I really do think that if you are offering people a time and place to learn something meaningful and relevant, they will come.

We had Pro-D sessions offered frequently at our district learning centre, but I think they are not well attended by high school teachers. I suspect (though I’ve never done any research) that a lot of it has to do with the time the session starts, when it ends, and how much marking / prep the teacher has to plow through. Recently, our district librarian has started offering Lunch and Learn sessions at various campuses around the district, and it seems to be hitting the spot.

The first thing I like about them is that they are open to whomever can and wants to make it. The first one was at my school, and I have to say that it was a relief to see several TL’s from other schools there. They helped to round out the numbers from our staff who attended. Had it just been our staff, it would have been embarrassing that the presenter had driven 4 hours to get there for only 6 people. Frankly, I think that getting 6 staff out was pretty good since this is a pretty new format.

The second thing that I like about them is that they are where the staff is, so it eliminates the hassle (and our city is under a lot of roadwork currently!) of getting to which ever cite by a certain time. Hopefully staff will start to look for these opportunities and we can fine tune the areas that people are interested in pursuing.

This last idea is the key, I think, and something of a no brainer. Last year I tried having inquiry sessions after school. A couple of teachers expressed interest, but only one actually came out. It worked out well for the two of us, and we were able to put together a great inquiry project for her textiles class. I was a little disappointed by the fact that only one person came out, but it was a great learning opportunity for both of us, and you can never know what you need to adjust to reach people until you try to reach people.

Seeing how well the Lunch and Learn sessions are going over district wide, and with our own staff, I think that I will be putting together a survey to see what kinds of sessions people would like to have. Much better than offering my skills which maybe they already have, or aren’t interested in at this moment. It’s also quite nice to be able to call upon an expert to help teach, and be off the performing hook!