Today's blog post is one of those times where I weave a few separate events into a single post via a unifying thread. The common concept is in the blog title: sharing IS caring.
One Big Map, Two Neighbouring Schools
I received an email from Molly, the teacher-librarian at a school close by to mine. She made a generous offer. She had arranged to borrow an Indigenous Peoples Atlas giant floor map that Canadian Geographic Education produced, as part of a teaching kit from our board's Library and Learning Resources Department. There were a couple of days that her school did not plan on using the map, so she wondered if my school would like to use it for a day or two.
I said yes, and on the designated day, Molly and Francis drove over with two huge bins. I had hoped to place it in the lunchroom, so that it would not disrupt any scheduled physical education periods in the gym. Sadly, my visual-spatial skills are still at the emerging level, and it did not fit. (We tried - Mr. Malisani and I removed all the furniture from the lunchroom with the hope of just curling up the edges of the map, but that effort was all in vain.)
My staff is incredible. They only had a day to interact with the map, and many of the activities that come with the map are lengthy. These educators were flexible and creative in the way they introduced this resource to their students. It wasn't play-time; it was thoughtful, age-appropriate guided exploration that referred back to previous lessons about land acknowledgements, treaties, and history.
Thank you Molly for lending us the map!
Sew and Snip, Now It'll Fit
I love co-planning, co-teaching, and co-assessing with classroom teachers. It's one of my favourite parts of being a teacher-librarian. Lisa Daley's Grade 7s are just about to submit their history inquiry projects (on Monday, January 20) and the two of us will evaluate them. There was a request from one group to use a costume for an Acadian woman. I found my Pilgrim Girl dress and brought it in. The students came back to me on Friday with concerns. The dress would not fit! We looked at the outfit and decided to recreate it with fabric we had on hand in the MakerSpace and my on-site sewing machine. In an hour, we assembled a pretty impressive dress, made from bedsheets and scraps.
The students were great problem-solvers, and when we lacked supplies, we were able to run to the kindergarten classroom, where Matthew Malisani generously gave us access to his stash of velcro fasteners.
Thank you Matt for providing the velcro!
Technology Trouble-shooting
On Friday, elementary teachers in the TDSB had a day to work on report cards. Thank goodness for this time! As a new ESL teacher, I don't have report cards in quite the same format. I use a program called TRELLIS for my official evaluations. I'm still becoming familiar with this system. It's not as smooth a process as my previous work completing report cards as a prep delivery teacher.
Another system I'm getting reacquainted with is the new look and layout for Moodle, the learning management system used by York University for the Additional Qualification courses they offer. On the previous Friday, Anna Jupp kindly gave up her lunch hour to give me a guided tour of the new features. The overview was helpful, but I was eager to learn about how to see all the unread posts on a single screen. Anna wasn't sure but promised to get back to me. As we wrestled with the settings, I turned to my co-facilitator for the TL AQs, Francis Ngo. He popped on a Zoom meeting and not only helped me find exactly what I sought in the new layout on Moodle, he showed me a resource to help me organize my approach to TRELLIS as well as demonstrated how to create drop-down menus in spreadsheets and taught me how to streamline my organization and tracking procedures for my new role as lead editor with Canadian School Libraries Journal.
Thank you Anna for the tutorial! Thank you Francis for the teaching and learning!
Treasure Mountain Canada 8 Research Symposium Papers
Treasure Mountain Canada, or TMC8 for short, is a research symposium and school library think tank. The event is held about every two years, and the eighth iteration is going to be held very soon, on Friday January 31 and Saturday February 1. The neat thing is that it has already started, with the release of all the papers written. To quote the symposium co-chairs, Carol Koechlin and Melanie Mulcaster,
In just two weeks we will be gathered in Toronto for the eighth Treasure Mountain Canada symposium. Many of the TMC8 papers contributed by enthusiastic and talented school library professionals and supporters right across the country are now published on our TMCanada Blog. We invite you to begin reading and responding to papers today. The paper writers will in turn respond to your comments and questions and others will join in with their ideas. These conversations are a very important component of the success of the TMC8.
I find it important (and a courtesy to all the writers who submitted papers) to read in advance all the contributions. There are 27 papers up so far. As of Friday, January 17, I've read 15 of them. I'm really impressed with the quality of the investigations. I'm also especially delighted by the number of writers I know from my Queen's University TL Specialist AQ courses - the final project in the course is to create a paper worthy of TMC. Even though they aren't required to actually submit their projects to TMC, so many of them are worthy of inclusion, and I'm happy that many teacher-librarians took my advice and shared their work with Canadian School Libraries. There are also projects that come from the York University TL AQ course candidates too (such as Ian Bates and Leigh Sanger). You can read the papers free of charge at https://tmcanada.blogspot.com/
Thank you to all the people who shared their papers with Canadian School Libraries!
Shared Wisdom With AI
I'm also getting ready to present at the Ontario Teachers Federation Curriculum Forum. My topic is on Artificial Intelligence. I know that the way I use GenAI may not be the way other educators use it, so I consulted with a few of my colleagues. Lexi, Diana, and Tracey kindly gave me their time to describe how they ethically use GenAI to help them with their jobs, without having it do their jobs for them.
Thank you Lexi, Diana, and Tracey for your insights!
