Posts Tagged ‘skills’

28
Mar
2023

Reflecting on creating a digital citizenship guide and video

categories: Digital citizenship, ETL523, Reflection

Assignment 1 for ETL523 had many challenges. The most challenging aspect for me was turning my ideas into reality in relation to the website and the video. I had very clear ideas about how I wanted the website and the video to look, but executing the ideas required a lot of practice in new skills, including manipulating HTML code. I have built a website once before using ThinkSpace, so I drew on that experience but challenged myself further by implementing features such as drop-down menus. I had to find my own information about how to do this, since this is not provided through the ThinkSpace user guides. I have never made a video before either, so that came with a new set of challenges with learning how to use unfamiliar software.

One aspect of this assignment that I found interesting was digging deep into Mark Ribble’s 9 Principles of Digital Citizenship, as outlined in ‘Digital Citizenship in Schools’ (2015). I have gained further understanding about areas of digital citizenship that I hadn’t considered before, including digital commerce and digital health and wellness.

Through doing this assignment, I would like to be involved in having an explicit digital citizenship program implemented at my school. All students at my school have a school-provided laptop and a range of, but not all, digital citizenship practices are embedded into the curriculum through teaching and modelling. After exploring through the range of skills required to be a capable digital citizen, I feel we are doing students a disservice by not providing explicit teaching of digital citizenship skills. A lot of these skills are assumed knowledge, but this is not a safe assumption to make. My school has a technology user agreement, which is generally a list of items such as ‘I agree to use my laptop in a responsible manner’, but no further instruction is given afterwards.

Using Ribble’s (2015) 9 Principles of Digital Citizenship as a framework, the students would benefit from explicit teaching of all areas of digital citizenship through the House Tutor Program. Students meet in their vertical house groups two times a week already so a possibility would be to implement a ‘skill of the week’ to be explicitly taught during one of the two sessions.

 

References

Ribble, M. (2015). Digital citizenship in schools (3rd edition). International Society for Technology in Education.

09
Apr
2021

Information Literacy in the school context

categories: ETL401, Information literacy, Inquiry learning, role of the Teacher Librarian

Mandy Lupton’s article Inquiry skills in the Australian Curriculum presents an interesting analysis of the links (and omissions) in the inquiry methods in the Australian Curriculum across the disciplines of Science, History and Geography.

These three disciplines give scope for inquiry learning, whether it’s guided inquiry with questions posed by the teacher, or open inquiry with questions posed by the student. Both of these inquiry models require the students to answer the questions using inquiry methods.

Inquiry models can be used across a variety of disciplines. It is important to have a consistent approach to inquiry so that the same techniques and methods are used consistently. Kath Murdoch’s Inquiry Cycle (Murdoch, 2019) is the inquiry method I am most familiar with as this is the model that is used in my K-12 school.

This uniform approach to information literacy is intertwined with collaboration between the TL, teachers and the principal. The vision of all three need to match so that the skills being taught and used by the students are systematic and consistent.

Lupton states that there are omissions in the Australian Curriculum when it comes to information literacy and the imbedded skills. This omission is seen as both an oversight, but at the same time an opportunity for the TL to shine in their role as curriculum innovators.

“If teacher librarians see their role as curriculum innovators, then integrating the Australian Curriculum strands into a coherent inquiry learning framework that explicitly integrates information literacy may be one of the most significant ways we can contribute to the implementation of the Australian Curriculum” (Lupton, 2014, p. 18).

This cannot be done by the TL alone. It needs to be a whole-school approach in order to achieve the best outcomes for students in their emerging and continuing skills in information literacy.

 

 

References

Lupton, M.(2014) Inquiry skills in the Australian Curriculum v6, Access, November

Murdoch, K. (2019). A model for designing a journey of inquiry. Retrieved from Kath Murdoch: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c7efeae4b0f5d2463be2d1/t/5d672b554646780001dbe0fd/1567042417794/%23A+MODEL+FOR+DESIGNING+A+JOURNEY+OF+INQUIRY.pdf