I was lucky enough to attend the SLAQ/IASL conference in the 2010 September holidays. With this CLN647 unit in mind I took a particular interest in a few sessions which dealt with mobile media, in particular Anne Weavers session, ‘Personal, Portable, Multifunction-Devices and School Libraries’.
I had expected more focus on e books and e readers at the conference. Anne Weaver did touch on e books briefly, as did a number of other speakers, including Pat Pledger, who’s paper ‘The future of the book? Challenge of the digital world’ makes for interesting reading. However I discovered little that I did not already know about e readers, and it seems the use of e readers in school libraries is still very much in its infancy. Having several Amazon Kindles in my library, with more on the way next year, I had hoped to delve more deeply into how these devices can be used with students.
I firmly believe that e readers have the potential to transform the school library, the role of the TL and how we engage students with literature. CLN647 has started the transformation in my thinking about digital teaching and learning, and this SLAQ/IASL conference was further confirmation that I am headed in the right direction.
With this in mind I have updated my unit of work to introduce Year Six students to the Kindle readers.
I started work on this unit earlier in the year, but put it aside, deciding that I needed to learn to use the Kindles before I introduced them to students. However CLN647 has encouraged me to learn with my students, and taught me that I do not need to be the expert up the front of the classroom, adept at this new technology. So I doing things differently in that I am embracing and experimenting with new and innovative technologies and pedagogies and learning as I go!
Having now finished the planning for this unit of work, I hope to give it a test run in Term Four 2010 and refine it as I go.
I plan to use my library blog in a similar fashion to our CLN647 blogs, as a way of students submitting work, and evaluation their own learning, and the unit as a whole. Learners of today live in a world where communication and information is instant and participation in the information gathering and forming process is obligatory (Oblinger, 2008). Blogs and other web 2.0 technologies provide educators with a forum to allow students to engage in connected learning and utilize the power of their learning networks.
This unit of work will need to remain flexible and innovate in design, and be continuously revised. Mobile technologies such as the e reader are becoming more commonplace in educational institutions, and the next few years will see a greater uptake in use (Johnson, Levine, Smith and Stone,2010). As pedagogical approaches and teaching tools ‘catch up’ with the technology, so too my unit of work will need to evolve. Evaluation and renewal has always been a central facet of the teaching and learning cycle, but in the digital context this is particularly crucial in order that enhanced teaching and learning can occur in an environment that is stimulating and creative for learners.
I will now also harness the social nature of the internet in order to stay abreast of how e readers are being used in schools. I have used social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flicker for personal use…but have never really had any need to look again at SNS in a work context.
I have now joined several e readers groups online, and can recommend these groups to others who are grappling with how e-readers can be used in the educational context.
At the previously mentioned SLAQ/IASL conference I followed all the Twitter posts…there would often be 7-10 tweets in a one hour presentation. I found this astonishing, but also incredibly useful, and have stored many mentioned sites and papers to do with mobile media for future use. I picked several teacher librarians who are using e readers to follow on Twitter.
I also plan to start a blog, just for my personal use. I have been grappling for some time with how to store all the weblinks etc that one picks up at conferences, through study and through being a member of groups like the OZTLNet. I’m now going to create a blog for me to store my links and thoughts on where I am at e readers and other mobile media. It will keep me critically reflective of what I do and how I do it. That is the plan anyway…
References:
Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R. & Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report. Austin , Texas
Oblinger, D. (2008). Growing up with Google: What it means to education. Emerging Technologies for Learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment