Harte Loves Books

Transitioning the Learning Commons into a Digital Space  Pandemic Plan of Action  Learning Commons: Context and Background  Jan-Feb 2020 The reference and nonfiction collection at my school Rundle College Primary-Elementary is one that is in the process of becoming more up-to-date and aligned with curriculum. Moving from a donations model to a consciously curated collection has been a piece of my long-range planning from the beginning of the year. As a new teacher librarian in a role that is new to the school, the first job was to get a sense of the reference collection. From there, I picked a subject to focus on and worked on updating the nonfiction collection section by section. This involved weeding, selecting quality replacements and developing bibliographies.  Part of the distant future planning involved building a website and a resources hub for teachers, but that was not part of my immediate planning model. As of January 2020, the Learning Comm...

(image sourced from Pixabay.com) This course has fundamentally shifted my views and skill set in what it means to be a teacher-librarian. In conjunction with COVID-19’s widespread shutdown of schools, I have been forced to utilize and put into action the digital Information Service skills learned and discussed in this course. My comfort zone in the learning commons is books. Reading picture books aloud, connecting readers to new series and sharing book talks is what I am good at. Learning about effective research, and supporting teachers through inquiry and utilizing new tools was my area of growth for this term. What an incredible opportunity to put this into action. As noted in Riedling, “the role of reference services in the school library is to help students use library resources to obtain relevant and credible information to meet their needs (…)  helping students define their information needs, creating learning environments for collaboration, teaching students to...