2. Vision of a Learning Commons in Christ! I thank my God every time I remember you. 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. 7 9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. Philippians 1: 3-9
17. Encourage multi layered Learning Safe search engines How to use Google Qwiki Teacher Youtube, Vimeo, Animoto Computer applications Project Based learning Incorporate Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning
18. Lib Answers Chat tweet, email your librarian via archived learning commons subscription.
27. Flat Stanley Wiki- Short term goal. Make Stanley your new best friend. Grade 1- 3 students. Read book, template, email or snail mail. Primary teachers connect using Skype in Classroom. HCS teachers encourage students to sign up. Contact Shandra, Eirena or myself to have your name added to our fenced wiki, to share videos!
31. Invitation to YOU? We would love to see your digital footprint on our learning commons! Send us your ideas. Join our Open Learning Commons. Join us on FB and Twitter and develop a professional network. Start imagining a world without walls, extending God’s global community.
Notas del editor
Welcome to HCS Learning Commons! My name is Pippa and I am blessed to be a learning commons specialist along with Shandra, Eirena, Natalie, and Kelly. Steve and Paul complement our LC committee. This is our first year as a blended library, and as a team we are excited to partner with you and our student community in our learning commons vision.
I have been a teacher librarian for the last 30 years (oops gives my age away) and can remember the nostalgia of my first work place in the SA library. Literacy is innate in me, and I want to share with you how libraries have changed for the better. Remember when? Long aisles, crowded book shelves, artificial light and ladders were needed to find your book! Part of the enjoyment as a librarian was of course helping your student or parent find their resources in this maze of book information .
Of course the card catalogue or tombs of information were the shining pride and joy to increase the speed of information retrieval.
Do you remember the sheer joy of finding your primary resource and sharing it proudly on your bibliography. Your teacher and librarian were very proud when you found current information right at your fingertips!
Time was of the essence filling out every pocket card to finally get your books and be out the door!
Revelation! The first computer brought tears to librarian eyes. Yes information retrieval was now instant even if it took forever to get your computer going in the morning with DOS. We were so Techie!!
But we still liked to keep the peace and quiet. After all students were studying and they did not need any other noise to compete!
Boring!
30 years later and welcome to Blended Learning and the Information Age where Google Apps, Wordles.Prezis, Storybirds, Blabberize, Vimeo and Evernote became the cool tools to use on Iphones, Ipads, laptops. Suddenly learning was instant, information was insurmountable and filters were needed.
Librarians and teachers could not keep up with the technology onslaught as students were now expected to become all of the following: a critical thinker, a problem solver, innovator, communicator, collaborator, global citizen, self directed, medial literate and financiall and economically literate. Whew!! And we still sleep at night!
As the information onslaught doubled every day, it became our responsibility to help students evaluate resources for authority, Christian worldview, bias, relevancy and currency.
How do we make these transitions with God’s help?
First we invite your prayer and second we invite your participation and collaboration as we move forward.
We look forward to hearing what our open learning commons can do to help us meet our long term vision.
We encourage you to start collaborating with your students via blogs, wiki, skype in the classroom, and social networks. Blogs in the younger group can be fenced and then we need to teach safe digital citizenship to our older students so they can travel cyberspace with wisdom.
LibAnswers is a reference based commons that archives all questions and answers hence speeding up the information retrieval process.
We are excited to have our first Purposeful Play wiki with Gord Holden taking us all on our first virtual world adventure! We look forward to many more such playgrounds for our students.
We hope to have a student teen geek squad who can give us advice, teach some of their own tutorials and collaborate with others. We plan to hold a Design your own contest for the new LC In Jan. We also hope to see our book clubs grow this year. These are on Elluminate or Skype and our moderators April and Kathy are excited to see these come to fruition.
The parent voice is vital and how we enlist their participation is also in the works. Parents have a vital voice to make the difference in the growth of our learning commons.
Resources we have right now include a weblinking library.
A soon to be E library consisting of Ebooks and Ereaders through the platform of Overdrive.
Bloggers we invite you to join us here and add your blog and start developing your professional collaboration.
Subscription databases from Discovery Streaming to reference systems like Ebcsohost.
Changes will be made to our learning commons as we transition into new space down the road. We hope to make the space more inviting, with less books on shelves, and more room for students to just come and engage and use some of our IPADs and Ereaders
