Tag Archives: Digital

Reflecting on the use of technology in learning environments

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I had previously considered the various ways information presented itself (Piper, 2022b) but this subject has encouraged me to consider the benefits of accessing, experiencing and utilising digital information for many purposes. Critical information literacy is at the forefront of learning for the 21st century learner, and TLs are best placed to support change and growth in digital literacy (Neely-Sardon & Tignor, 2018).

I find myself uniquely positioned in the school community for: curriculum needs; information literacy skills; knowledge; and expertise in the use of digital tools. As information experts in a growing digital world, TLs increasingly create resources such as learning objects (LOs) to guide users in the digital environment. Digital LOs add value to learning outcomes when critical thinking strategies are explained in interactive learning experiences (Goodset, 2020).

The opportunity to create a digital research guide, prompted me to consider factors such as web page layout, content accessibility, and content relevance (Cousins, 2014). The creation of a research guide for a group of Stage 2 students highlighted some challenges such as the variety of resources available and readability evaluations. Resources available online were often repetitive and presented in similar formats such as videos. Critical selection criteria were applied to ensure the resources were inclusive of the needs of my students. Students use and learn from research guides in different ways, so these resources needed to provide equitable access through imagery, text, audio, and opportunity for extension (Alverson et al., 2015).

In discussion forum 2.2, it was observed that some resources recommended for certain age groups were identified as being of a much higher readability level when  analysed by readability tools (Piper, 2022, August 1). Whilst the readability tool is helpful in recommending reading levels, our professional judgement as TLs is equally important when selecting resources for learning experiences.

Search engines are often utilised in information literacy programs. A comparison of search engines identified advantages and disadvantages in layout for the 21st century learner. I highlighted the benefits of having less ads presented when researching for specific content and discussed the reliability of some search engines over others (Piper, 2022d). Similar thoughts were shared with fellow students having identified a lack of consistency amongst many search engines and the need to promote one over the other when it came to teaching our younger students Piper, 2022, October 2).

Identifying these differences in search engines made me reflect on the digital tools I use in teaching. The use of specific digital learning tools during the pandemic made me realise that I hadn’t been critically applying selection criteria for using diverse tools (Piper, 2022c). Carrington’s Padagogy Wheel presents a selection of tools available for critical information learning and how they can support different domains of pedagogical thinking (Carrington, 2016). This model spurs me to consider how I can change and diversify the digital tools I use in my teaching practice to best support my 21st century learners.

My current library space demonstrates many limitations, not least because of the lack of digital resources and tools physically available (Piper, 2022a). As the TL within my school, I know that I must maintain current knowledge of digital tools and resources. Embedding future-focused pedagogy and tools in my dynamic library environment will ensure that my students remain critical users and creators of information.

 

References

Alverson, J., Schwartz, J., Brunskill, A., & Lefager, J. (2015). Creating audience and environment-friendly research guides: Findings from a user study (pp. 125–133). https://alair.ala.org/bitstream/handle/11213/17841/CreatingAudienceEnvironmentFriendlyResearchGuide.pdf?sequence=1

Carrington, A. (2016, June 20). The Padagogy Wheel. Education Technology Solutions; Interactive Media Group PTY LTD. https://educationtechnologysolutions.com/2016/06/padagogy-wheel/

Cousins, C. (2014, November 24). Website design for kids: Tips and advice. Design Shack. https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/website-design-for-kids-tips-and-advice/#

Goodsett, M. (2020). Best practices for teaching and assessing critical thinking in information literacy online learning objects. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 46(5), 102163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102163

Neely-Sardon, A., & Tignor, M. (2018). Focus on the facts: A news and information literacy instructional program. The Reference Librarian, 59(3), 108–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2018.1468849

Piper, J. (2022a, August 1). Making the most of my school library space. Lines of Thought: Reflections of a Teacher Librarian. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/jennyp/2022/08/01/making-the-most-of-my-school-library-space/

Piper, J. (2022b, August 1). The dynamic information environment. Lines of Thoughts: Reflections of a Teacher Librarian. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/jennyp/2022/08/01/the-dynamic-information-environment/

Piper, J. (2022c, October 2). Exploring the use of digital tools in the learning environment. Lines of Thoughts: Reflections of a Teacher Librarian. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/jennyp/2022/10/02/exploring-the-use-of-digital-tools-in-the-learning-environment/

Piper, J. (2022d, October 2). Using search engines well. Lines of Thoughts: Reflections of a Teacher Librarian. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/jennyp/2022/10/02/using-search-engines-well/

Utilising learning objects

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Prior to this course, I hadn’t really considered the TL as a publisher of resources. As TLs providing support for students and teachers, particularly in the information field, it is no surprise to learn that TLs are indeed publishers of resources such as Learning Objects (LO).

LOs offer unique opportunities to inform and guide both students and teachers, in the learning of a specific task (Memorial University, 2016). Providing digital LOs allow users to access these resources outside of school, or without the presence of a TL. For teachers, the flexibility of digital LOs means they can edit copies of LOs to suit their specific teaching task and to meet the needs of identified students.

As a TL, the creation and publication of LOs for my school clientele, opens up the opportunity to utilise specific resources within my school’s library collection that will support the school’s teaching and learning programs. The creation of templates allow the flexibility of creating multiple online resources addressing specific topic requirements in a very short space of time. As we all know, time is valuable and precious.

When I have taught my Stage 3 (yrs 5 and 6) students content that has required notetaking, I have often struggled with providing a user friendly tool that can be accessed repeatedly as their need arises. The idea of creating an LO for this specific task, is inspirational. Reading Dr Claire Brown’s article on effective note-taking has prompted me to reflect and think about how I can improve my services as TL for my students.

Becoming confident creators of LOs for the benefit of our library clientele, ensures that library users will value the creation of digital resources that can be applied to various aspects of teaching and learning.

 

References

Brown, Dr. C. (2015, May 21). What’s the best, most effective way to take notes? The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/whats-the-best-most-effective-way-to-take-notes-41961

Memorial University. (2016, April 18). What are Learning Objects? Instruct­ional Resources: Resources
for Instructors to Use When Planning, Creating, Teaching, and Assessing.
https://blog.citl.mun.ca/instructionalresources/what-are-learning-objects/#

Exploring the use of digital tools in the learning environment

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When I reflect on the changing digital environments I am seeing in my school and beyond, I am challenged by the three questions mentioned in my reading modules:

  • Why am I using the tool?
  • What are the students learning when using the tool?
  • How will I know what they have learnt (assessment)?

To date, this course has really challenged my preconceptions of the role of TLs and how we certainly are the information experts and should be at the forefront of digital knowledge and change that we then share with and teach to our school communities.

The recent years of COVID-19 and its subsequent lockdowns, meant that teachers and students alike had to embrace learning through digital means. It was my first foray into really using Google products such as forms, docs and Google Classroom as teaching tools. At the time, I didn’t have much of a choice in using these tools. It was what the school was currently using, other teachers were somewhat familiar with these products, and so we teamed together to create resources and learning means for our students.

The Pedagogy wheel prompts me to critically reflect and consider the usefullness and potential limitations of the few digital tools I do use in teaching. It is clear that digital tools are becoming the norm in the learning environment. It is part of our everyday environment, and increasingly being a requirement of career skills. On this note, I feel it is my role to ensure I am equipped with knowledge and expertise to expose and guide my students to useful and diverse technological tools for diverse learning. The challenge here is: how do I keep up to date with changes in the use of future-focused learning tools? By participating in forums, and reading material distributed by educational authorities, such as Technology 4 Learning, I can ensure that I am exposed to new material, new tools, and new thoughts in teaching. By actively participating in these future-focused discussions, and practising the use of these teaching tools, I can only hope that my skills and knowledge as a technology user and teacher will improve. Advocating for diversity in the use of technological learning tools, and sharing my expertise to support school staff and students, will no doubt strengthen digital citizenship and information literacy.

Evaluating the usefullness of digital resources

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When I consider the resources I use in my school library for teaching purposes, at the forefront of my mind is the usefullness and accessibility of the resource to my students. In my current TL role, I am teaching students from K-6. The main aim of my program has been information literacy that supports other KLA’s such as history and geography. My focus then has been teaching the beginnings of researching and resource analysis from years 3 and up. As such, when I plan to share a resource, in particular a digital resource, I critically analyse the resource to determine its usefullness and applicability to the task at hand. But what about students? How do they analyse resources with a level of understanding that is needed to assess resources? Using CRAAP as an analytical tool, has been helpful but it seems to have its drawbacks.

Teaching CRAAP has had mixed results. Students get stuck using the analysis well and often forget to use this tool the following year in subsequent research activities. It has made me question, is my teaching lacking clarity? is it a lack of retention on the students behalf? or is it simply that the tool is too complex for their level of understanding to apply successfully? More than likely it is a combination of all. And I am willing to embrace different modes of analysis to improve my teaching and student learning.

Too often fantastic books are left on the shelves in the library, in favour of easily accessible online resources. After all, give a child a laptop or an ipad and away they go, right? Wrong. Students need to be given the tactile opportunity to explore texts, especially non-fiction texts. My observation of my students shows me that unless they are strongly encouraged to use and understand the layout of non-fictional texts, navigating a website or digital resource well,  will be challenging, regardless of their age. Using CRAAP has made my students more aware of the currency, reliability, accuracy and authority of resources, rather than a resource for the sake of giving/ providing information. However, there are still challenges with teaching the concept of bias when we look at the P element being Purpose.

Kay Oddone’s video on CRAAP versus SIFT shows a great example of how a website can pass the CRAAP test fairly well, but have the reliability of information challenged in another resource, such as a video. As a TL, it has made me question whether teaching critical analysis of resources can be better performed by encouraging the use of SIFT. I really like the idea of students stopping before clicking on any hyperlinks on any web source, to really think critically about the resource. Perhaps this is the tool missing from my teaching program. By implementing a tool such as SIFT, I hope that the idea of bias will be better understood and critically applied and evaluated in student learning.

The dynamic information environment

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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.

Technological change in our midst.

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Technological change has been undergoing change on a regular basis since the industrial revolution. From a digital perspective it is undergoing change that is constant, and will continue to affect the way our lives are lived in future.

With regards to information, change is seemingly never ending. Our readings for this module asks as to think about who or what is driving technological change? I struggle to completely understand the concept of determinism. Unless of course I am simply over-thinking this. In a nut shell, my understanding is that determinism is the theory that all events are determined by pre-existing causes. Without these causes humans won’t have the free will to make future choices.

What does this have to do with technological change? Clearly this is alluding to the cause of technological change. Humans. Society. We have so many digital platforms available to us, that it is how it affects our way of thinking and what we do with that thinking process that determines our future choices. Hence determinism. With human’s intrinsic drive and motivation to improve on the past, make changes to be more valuable and efficient, I believe this is the cause for technological change.

I marvel at the awe when a young student tells me what they have learnt about ‘the olden days’. Discussion in question was about a wash board. Such a simple tool used for doing a mundane task that is washing. Nowadays, we of course use an electric washing machine that not only makes the job less burdensome but lessens the time needed to complete the task. The ‘olden days’. What will our future be like? Today will, at some point, become the olden days.

Such is the case with information and technology. If society’s use of the washboard motivated inventors to improve on the simplistic design to make it more efficient, how much so will our use of electronic gadgetry to seek information, spur current and future inventors, engineers and scientists to create tools that provide information at a faster and more intelligable and accessible rate?

Such a complex concept to digest yet at it’s core, humans seem to be the driver of change.

The information landscape.

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My previous post looked at understanding information as a ‘thing’. Something to be gained, manipulated and used for purposes hopefully with wisdom. I likened the current state of affairs as the information environment being an overgrown jungle. So many different platforms and modes accessible to users.

I was challenged to explore the different aspects of the information landscape. When you consider the  formats available and the delivery modes, one realises that information is a constant in our lives. It is everywhere, every day, every moment of our waking lives.

Information comes to us in all forms of carriers: the internet, books, recordings, manuscripts, etc. This fact of course is liable to change in future. The concept of the World Wide Web is relatively new when you think of the history of the industrialised nations. In future who knows what will exist that doesn’t exist today! It is no wonder then that the definition of information is undergoing change on a regular basis, or at the very least being extended to include new definitions.

McCreadie and Rice discusses access to information utilising 4 conceptualisations. Information is a resource or a commodity that can be produced, purchased and manipulated; information is environmental as it provides perceived data in our surrounds; information is representational; and information is a communication process. The concept of environment really struck a chord with me. Yes I was aware that information is around us, but I hadn’t thought consciously that our environment is providing ‘data’ that we need to analayse on a consistant basis.

This leads to the equally interesting illustration of the Shannon model. Could information presentation and communication be a bit like Chinese whispers? I know too well the obstacles and challenges that come with Chinese whispers. As a hearing impaired citizen, gaining information can be challenging when relying on audio alone. All the more reason to double check what I have heard, and investigate environmental data to confirm my understandings.

Navigating facts and seeking reliable information leads us to consider different levels of information available. As Masters students, we were asked to investigate the deep web and interact2. Such vast domains with even more information that forces us to carefully analyse and use wisely. Information presented in the digital sense, is truly layered, dense and complex.

With information at our fingertips and increasingly accessible to people from all walks of life, what are the ramifications of this reality? Reflecting on my own use and access to information, I can identify three benefits and negatives.
The benefits:
1) Availability. As a teacher, I am striving to ensure my students are  informed and guided young citizens. I therefore need to have access to current and relevant information with which to inform and educate my students no matter the topic. Information that I need is there when I need it. If I don’t know something, I can search and find it.
2) Accessibility. I can inform myself as a teacher, student and citizen on current news and data that will be relevant to my life. I can learn new skills by accessing instructions and procedures. I can entertain myself by accessing visuals, podcasts, and literature. I can educate myself by logging in to my online learning modules at any time or place.
3) Currency. Having access to information all the time means we can be armed with current information and be in the present. When researching topics, whether it be as a student or teacher collating useful sources for my students, I can access information that is recent, relevant and up to date with the latest research.

The negatives:
1) Constant. My previous post talked about the realities of living during the world pandemic that is COVID-19. Daily, the news blares out new statistics, images of doom and gloom and a sense of hopelessness. We wake up to a radio spewing information. We turn on our computers to open up emails to access information. We check noticeboards for information. No matter what we do information is in front of us, whether we are deliberately accessing it or not.
2) Overload. For me, information overload is a new sensation that is proving negative. Interestingly it is making me understand how my mind works in more detail. Being a citizen, a parent, a teacher and now a student, I am having to access all sorts of information in all sorts of places. With dates and information to remember, calendars are very useful tools for keeping track of engagements and so on, but still there is so much. Come Friday’s, it is not uncommon for me to say “My brain is just too tired”. Surely a sign of information overload.
3) Higher expectations. With greater access to the information landscape, the expectation to perform to a higher degree increases. I listed my roles earlier, all of these roles have different expectations. With information at every turn, the pressure to keep up to date, perform and evaluate is always there. Beginning this course, I knew I would have to prioritise my time differently and complete more work. With this fact, the pressure to perform definitely increased. Without ready access to information, I don’t think I would be up late completing readings online, comparing my work to other examples online to ensure I am performing well, receiving multiple emails to complete the next task whatever that may be. Yes, constant accessible information certainly means we pressure ourselves with higher expectations.

Yet the information I access is just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. Combe’s infographic clearly illustrates how much we use and access.

Information will always be in our midst. How we access, interpret and use it however will, I’m sure, be an ever changing realisation.