Digital Literacy and your library catalogue

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Have you ever used your library catalogue as a digital literacy tool? Is this the starting block to online research? We would love to hear how you are moving forward or planning to move forward on this journey.

[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

 

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Hi Matt

I too have been thinking a lot about this topic. I have run a couple of training sessions which I think have been useful.

Digital literacy and the School Library is a webinar I recorded last year.  I also ran a small group training session around the same topic that you can see here. These currently only can be booked as a group but I am planning to create them as a Moodle course when I get round to it.

I wrote this article that helped me think about this more fully when I was planning the training. You right find it useful.

Getting together with a group of librarians to define the skills would be really useful. Maybe start with the FOSIL skills framework document and go from there… If you need help to use it I am currently creating a Moodle called Raising awareness of your school library and your expertise through your library management system. In one of the sections, I talk through how to use the skills framework. I hope to have this ready by the end of September.

I agree working with teachers within an inquiry project is a great way to encourage use as it also helps teachers understand how the system works.

If you ever get your group of librarians together let me know 😊.

 

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