When I think of the dynamic information environment, I immediately think of information and how people access different types of information. As a TL, I reflect on the ways my students access information for learning and investigative purposes and how I guide their learning to help them build research skills.

My library space is limited when it comes to digital access and so my programming requires forward planning and liasing with fellow staff to book and secure access to laptops and ipads. My students thus spend the infant years understanding, learning and practising how non-fictional books are used and accessed. These skills are used and further refined from year 3 onwards, combining with digital research. It would be great to imagine my library space as one that creatively caters to the diverse learning needs of my students at the click of my fingers, however, this is not a reality and I know this scenario is repeated in many other schools. My school is fortunate to have a tech teacher who guides and supports tech and science utilising the tech room. Here, students use a range of digital tools applicable to their learning. Tools such as Book Creator, Word Clouds, Minecraft, Google Earth, and more, are all used to engage our diverse students to demonstrate learning success for a variety of outcomes and across KLA’s.

So, can I consider my library space a dynamic information environment? In a way, yes. At first glance it may not seem as such, considering the lack of obvious digital tools available for student use. But, we must remind ourselves that information is found in all sorts of places. Books, online, posters, magazines, signs, toys, and other tactile materials. I encourage my students to seek information from environmental print, provide opportunities to tell and retell stories using lego story boxes, rotate displays and always promote books about particular topics, authors or the latest trends. It is all too easy, in this digital age, to forget there was a time before ‘the internet’. Increasingly TLs and educators are striving to self educate on the latest digital tool or online information access point. While this is all well, I think there is still value in teaching students information access via books. Our diverse society means there is still inequitable access to digital tools by families, and we need to ensure these members of our communities  have the opportunity to develop the skills required to access information. As TLs, it is thus imperative that we maintain a diverse information environment, ensuring that we capture the curiosity of all of our students, staff and school community.