I am beyond thrilled to share my first completed piece of digital literature – click here to access Library Time. For something as simple as it may appear, it has taken a surprisingly long time to conceptualise, create, analyse, and improve before declaring finished (for now!).
This digital storytelling artefact will be in use in Term 1 2026 as I have recently accepted a position in a secular independent K-12 school in regional New South Wales. The school is in its seventh year of operation and has nearly two hundred students enrolled from pre-school to Year 12. The library itself is two years old, and has not had a qualified teacher librarian on staff before now.
The school adheres to the NSW Education Standards Authority K-6 and 7-10 Syllabuses (Central West Leadership Academy, 2025), then Year 11 and Year 12 students complete the International Baccalaureate. This structure can be attributed to the transient nature of the student cohort; many transfer from international schools, and may not stay in Australia for the duration of their schooling. The IB provides a flexible learning option with easily translatable outcomes for these students. As a result, the community features a number of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Aside from English, the top five languages spoken at home are Nepali, Mandarin, Malayalam, Tagalog, and Sinhala (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).
Library Time is developed for use with students from Kindergarten to Year 2 (though would be appropriate for students above this beyond if they were new to the school, developing their language skills, or needed a social narrative to scaffold full participation). I will be using it in class to explain how library sessions will run, to set up expectations for learning behaviours, and to pre-empt common questions about visits to the library. It can be used again during the year to re-iterate expectations as needed, or edited and re-read if there are changes to the program.
It can also be used in English as a model of a procedural text for shared analysis by K-2 learners similarly to how Broderbund’s Grandma and Me (1992) does. Further along in the syllabus, it could be used as an exemplar for Stage 2 and 3 in selecting a digital technology that is fit for their audience and producing a digital text with it that fulfils a given purpose (NESA, 2022).
I chose to create Library Time using Google Slides, as I had a particular aesthetic (think the Reading A-Z digital readers) in mind, and certain functionalities that I knew could be achieved using Slides but that I had not used before.
The structure of Library Time is based on the Social Stories model but as there are elements that deviate from their criteria (such as the prescribed balance of description versus coaching language) it would be considered a social narrative instead (Gray etc. al., 2023). As well as being optimised for neurodivergence via third-person perspective, procedural language, and repeated key terms (Scattone et. al., 2002; Hanrahan et. al., 2020) the narrative has also been constructed with English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) students in mind as a narrative that builds on existing school-based vocabulary and adds language for a more specific purpose (Rossbridge and Rushton, 2019), similar to the support available through VoxBooks.
To that end, the narrative can be read and listened to in English and read in Sinhala (two of the top six languages spoken in the school community) so that students can experience multiple modes of input. The degree of independence with which they access the text can be scaffolded as their literacy increases. First it can be read aloud by their teacher at school, then by their parent in their first language at home. Then it can be listened to independently (at this stage in English but eventually in Sinhala as well), then read independently in the written language with which they feel most comfortable.
This would be manifestly more difficult to achieve if it were not in a digital format, as access would be restricted to one mode of input, one language, and one borrower at a time. All students at the school are required to own a Chromebook from Kindergarten. Thus, the text would be accessible to the intended audience from anywhere with internet.
It would also be possible for teachers of the early learning students to read it to the incoming Kindergarten cohort, and for parents of the early learning students to access and read it to/with their children at home in preparation for Kindergarten.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2016). 2016 Dubbo Census All Persons Quickstats. https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2016/SSC11296
Autism Awareness Australia. (2024). Using Visuals and Social Stories. https://www.autismawareness.com.au/navigating-autism/using-visuals-and-social-stories-for-autism
Broderbund (1992). Just Grandma and Me. Microsoft Windows.
Central West Leadership Academy. (2025). Policies – RoSA. https://theacademy.nsw.edu.au/policies
Gray, C., Faherty, C., Timmins, S., and Lanou, A. (2023). Social Stories 10.4 Critera for Carole Gray Social Stories. https://carolgraysocialstories.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023-Social-Stories-10.4-Criteria-1.pdf
NSW Education Standards Authority. (2022). English K-10 Syllabus. https://curriculum.nsw.edu.au/learning-areas/english/english-k-10-2022/overview
Hanrahan, R., Smith, E., Johnson, H., Constantin, A., & Brosnan, M. (2020). A Pilot Randomised Control Trial of Digitally-Mediated Social Stories for Children on the Autism Spectrum. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 50(12), 4243–4257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04490-8
Rossbridge, J. and Rushton, K. (2019). Tell Me Your Story: Working With EAL/D Students In Mainstream Classrooms. Journal for Professional Learning: Centre for Professional Learning – NSW Teachers’ Federation, 2(5). https://cpl.nswtf.org.au/journal/semester-2-2019/tell-me-your-story-working-with-eal-d-students-in-mainstream-classrooms/
Scattone, D., Wilczynski, S. M., Edwards, R. P., & Rabian, B. (2002). Decreasing disruptive behaviors of children with autism using social stories. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 32(6), 535-543. doi: 10.1023/A:1021250813367 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10928813_Decreasing_Disruptive_Behaviors_of_Children_with_Autism_Using_Social_Stories