Edging Ahead…

I’ve blogged about this before.  Of course, at the time, we were looking at Online Safety. But the rationale is the same. Standards, like Safety, have to be embedded in the very Fabric of what we do. It’s everyone’s job. Swap out “Standards” for “Online Safety” and you get;

Essential Question: Who’s job is it to teach the NETs and AASL standards to students?

It’s Everyone’s Responsibility (if we decide that NETs and AASL standards are what we aspire to, that is).

• Everyone
• Everyone teaching
• Everyone teaching kids
• Everyone teaching kids to standards
• Everyone teaching kids to online standards
• Everyone teaching kids to standards
• Everyone teaching kids
• Everyone teaching
• Everyone…

So who’s “everyone”? Everyone is;

• the classroom teacher who faces the kids day to day)
• the special-subject teacher (Health, PE, etc, who meet the kids at intervals)
• the support specialist (Technology, Information Literacy, who largely support teachers)
• the counsellors, who support the kids in meeting teachers’ expectations
• the administration (who oversee those who meet the kids f2f)
• the parents, who trust the schools to set “the standards”

And that, of course, begs the question, “Who’s job is it to SET the standards?”

But that’s a question for another day.

Authoring for Educators – Final Assignment

While this course has ostensibly been about “authoring” digital learning materials, in the end, I decided to concentrate on alternative c. from the final assignment.

c. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.

After experimenting with a number of new (to me) and relatively unfamiliar digital authoring tools during the course, ultimately, this project needed to be  both practical and applicable to current objectives for the Main Library program.

At this time, we are concentrating on awareness of existing materials and services  with both students and teachers. In order to reach the widest possible audience of both, then, broader use of digital information presentation tools is called for. To this end, we are ramping up use of live media links of several types in our Main Library HS and MS Blogs which are set as the browser entry point for all students launching a browser in Main Library.

Using a blog as the library front-end has a number of advantages over using a homepage. To begin with, blogging platforms include the built-in theme and widget features which allow those with limited digital skills or time to assemble a reasonablly attractive page. Secondly, the blogging platform is easy to edit and to maintain a series of quick, relevant informational postings. Finally, the blogging platform has become relatively standardized, so that even users unfamiliar with this particular page can navigate relatively intuitively through it.

While exploration of digital authoring tools has been a worthwhile and engaging sidebar to the last six weeks, in the end, the important thing has been to select the most appropriate tools for the task at hand. Book trailers sponsored by media companies and made by professionals are effective at both promoting interest in new or underused titles in our collection and at presenting a model of effective promotion for students interested in trying it out themselves. the other tools used in our blogs have similar dual uses, and we will continue to try new options as we expand our exploration of this new digital landscape.