Reply To: Digital Literacy and your library catalogue

[Matt Participant]

Dear Elizabeth,

This topic caught my attention in the spring of 2020 when I found myself at home trying to teach library classes online. Since then I have tried to treat each library platform our library catalog, databases, child-friendly search engines, and websites, as platforms that have specific skills that need to be taught to students. When I have the opportunity to collaborate with a teacher I look at which platform would be good to incorporate into the activity and I spend lesson time explicitly teaching students skills they need to access and use that platform.

Long-term what I would like to do is work with the other librarians in my district to define the skills we need to teach students to access and use each platform and decide during what grades we want to teach those skills to the students.

This is a topic that I think we need to spend more time on. We cannot just expect that students will understand how to use our library platforms. We need to work with teachers to plan their use during inquiry projects and then teach them how to use them.

Kind regards,

Matt Rose