Learning, sharing, climbing…and sometimes falling

Living in Doha offers a myriad of opportunities for mental stimulation, entertainment, education, inspiration and sheer enjoyment.  However for every event I attend, I probably miss six – time constraints, poor time management, failure to prioritize………..however, be that as it may, I will look back on these years in Doha as being rich in experience, rich in opportunity, years of challenge and of choice.

Recent events have included the celebration of Doha having the title of the 2010 Arab Capital of Culture.  One celebration was the Cuban Flamenco Ballet, performing at the National Theatre – an extravaganza of color, music, energy and music.

The Doha Singers, Orchestra, String and Wind bands performed recently – again a real pleasure to listen to.  The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra performs on a regular basis – accessible to all.  Closer to home, many of our students were in the cast of Steve Griffiths’ Qatar Foundation production of Oliver! The Islamic Museum hosted a book signing of Mohammed Ali’s Victory over Abu Derya – The quest for pearls in the Arabian Gulf, a beautifully illustrated children’s story of pearl divers and their families in the days before Qatar’s rise as an oil and gas economy. The Museum is also currently hosting a marvelous exhibition of pearls.

I have been fortunate in being part of a group having the opportunity to study towards a SUNY certificate in Educational Technology on site at Qatar Academy.  We are just completing the second course – 21^st Century Literacy Ideas, Questions and Issues, led by Dr. John Turner.  Requirements for this course included putting into practice some of the tools at our disposal – discussion posts on a ning, and participating actively in the Twitter community. The final assignment was to submit a brief piece of action research, reporting on teaching / learning related to a 21st Century Literacy idea, question or issue. With assistance from the classroom teacher and technology integration facilitator, I was able to consider the question of information literacy as practiced in a Grade 3 class, and was very interested to find links to the inquiry cycle and to find that real connections are made between units of inquiry.  I look forward to following up on this research next year.

In terms of a weblog, or journal, this has been a resounding failure – the last entry being at the end of January, nearly four months ago.  However, life has moved on, progress has been made, and the future looks exciting, as I will attempt to explain.

In a previous post, I wrote of my desire to work more closely with teachers to ensure that students mastered the basic skills of information literacy.  It has been a long road, but the results have been positive.  When I first took up my position as primary school teacher librarian, I anticipated that there would be a flexible schedule.  However this was not the case.  This year, a collaborative relationship between the technology integration facilitators and librarians has been fostered, and it became clear that our goals were very similar, and there was a distinct overlap in what we were trying to achieve.  From this realization stemmed various presentations and meetings, and the final result was approval from administration that a flexible schedule in the primary library would be introduced in the 2010_11 school year.

Collaborative planning is the cornerstone on which success or failure will depend.  Our desire is that all the support teachers will work together to support the classroom teachers, under the auspices of the PYP coordinator and the program of inquiry.  This is the current focus of our thinking.

What is the role of a library in a school?  What is the role of our library in our school?  How does the library connect with individual student reading?  How can we make students aware of the magic of reading?

The magic of reading

The E-School news round up of the top 10 ED-tech stories of 2009 includes an article on free online tools to simplify research, and Richard Byrne’s blog Free Technology for teachers has a link to similar sites as well as to a tutorial from Springfield College’s Babson Library on how search engines operate and how to refine search results.  Intute is another site recommended by Richard Byrne – a site devoted to helping students find the best academic sources, and to become skilled researchers.  Included on this site is Internet Detective a “free online tutorial to learn to discern the good, the bad and the ugly for your online research”.

All these sites offer clear, straightforward, valuable information – the question for me is how to offer it at an appropriate level for primary school students in order to create the scaffolding they need as they begin doing their own research.  My intention is that these students enter middle school with an understanding of how to research, how to use the internet, and what to do with the information they find.  This is not an area which can be covered in the library alone, so my next question involves how to work with teachers to achieve the results we are all aiming for.

As I launch into the world of blogging, I ask myself what it is that I want to achieve.  Perhaps most of all it is to move from theory to practice.  For too long, I have spent hours familiarizing myself with Web 2.0 tools – thinking that one day they would be useful.  I have now reached the point where either I must find ways of using them in my library, or I must use the time I am currently spending learning about technology more profitably on something that I will use in my daily round.

The K12 online conference was very inspiring in this regard, and particularly Konrad Glogowski’s presentation in which he speaks about the need for professional development reflecting one’s own personal perspective.  Tom Barrett in his blog Edte.ch comments on blogging on what is pertinent and useful in his own classroom as opposed to what might be useful for others – I fully intend to follow the advice of both of these educators, and look forward to sharing my thoughts, and receiving your comments.