LIBE 477 Future Vision Project Post 1
E-Resources
The E-resources that are available through my LLC are acquired and made accessible through the School District 57's District Learning Commons. ( E-Resources available) Access to these resources is through their website. I often tend to forget that these resources even exist because they are a little removed from the school environment and I get zero time with computers and classes. Once or twice a year I remember they exist and put out an email blast to classroom teachers about what the resources are and how they may apply, but I haven't even spent a lot of time looking at the resources myself. I linked some of them to my LLC website but only the ones I thought students would use/learn independently. (website)
As I was contemplating what I could do for my Final Vision Project for LIBE 447 that I would find meaningful in the future and would have an impact on my teaching and learning, I kept thinking about these underutilized E-Resources. I think that the project that I would like to tackle will be to make a couple of guide documents for teachers (4-7 ideally). This would include a how to access various resources as well as a curricular breakdown of which resources apply to various parts of the science and social curriculum. The end product that I think I want to come out with is a document or package for teachers (printed and file on server) as well as the document up on the DLC website as a Lib Guide. Our DLC already has a few lib guides but they are mostly for high school (here). The reasons that I want to target the teachers are because I already send home a resource to families before the summer that outlines reading, coding, math, and science services that they may want to access over the summer months. Also, within the school building 99% of student access to/use of computers and technology is teacher guided and supervised. If I can sell some of these resources to the teachers as valuable in their computer time then they might use them instead of "Cool Math Games" or "Sumdog" ad nauseam. Also, I think that some students may access things like Culturegrams, 4 Canoes, and Nat. Geo. Kids on their own after they have been taught how to access them and navigate them in class.
The only example of a school (district) that has something kind of like what I am thinking of is the Surrey School District with their parent information sheets but even those are boring, word heavy, and don't really tell the user anything about the resource itself. I do love that they are offered in Punjabi as well as English.
I believe that this project will help to increase the access and usage of the E-Resources that are available. I hope that it is not too ambitious.
This sounds like a perfect Final Vision project. Creating some guide documents, with lots of instruction, tips, guides and images can be very helpful for your colleagues and community. I would even recommend going a little bit deeper and perhaps creating a short screencast video of a tour of these databases and resources to show your audience how to navigate or access these tools. A good usage of your final vision to benefit your current environment and perhaps even help other schools around your district with promotion and access of these electronic resources. Looking forward to following along with your development.
ReplyDeleteFirst thanks for sharing all of those great resources! I followed some of your links, and ended up falling down a virtual rabbit hole for half an hour, and adding several resources to my Google Classroom. That sounds like a great idea for a vision project.
ReplyDeleteA tool you might find helpful for this project, for students, is Symbaloo (https://www.symbaloo.com/home/mix/13eOcLj6h4). It is a web page essentially, but you program web links into buttons, and select images or texts for the buttons, for example a websites logo that students easily recognise. Basically it makes web links look like app buttons. They then just click the button and go right to the site. I have heard of teachers using this tool and setting it as the homepage on all of their school computers. I have also heard of them sending home the web address to parents on bookmarks, which also included a scan-able QR code that could be typed in or scanned at home to allow easy access to the same resources at home. Symbaloo pages can also be linked to other symbaloo pages. For example, you could have a picture of a number one, and this links to the Symbaloo grid with all of grade one resources. Or buttons for subjects like science that links to Symbaloo pages with all science resources.
Though if you feel that this tool may be helpful to you, I would recommend subscribing to the add-free pro version. Some of the ads I have seen (while not 18+) were not appropriate for students, example models wearing nude coloured underwear that I had to do a double-take at.