Reading Review Blog Post #1: Brainstorm time

Last year, I spent many months in career turmoil, wondering what direction I should be heading.  Do I want to eventually head back into the classroom?  And I've been contemplating the question, what IS my passion?  Why isn't this something I already know? How I determined that I wanted to begin my Teacher-Librarianship Diploma was the simple fact that I love children's literature.  Plain and simple.  Maybe naive? My thought process was that I can continue working at my current job as I work on this diploma and one day, should the opportunity arise, perhaps I will find a job as a teacher-librarian.  I can continue to teach but have a singular focus:  kids lit.

Currently, I work for a Distributed Learning school as a K-9 Home teacher working with families who home school.  My position has morphed dramatically over the course of the last three years that I have worked here.  While I used to only use Microsoft Word, Dropbox, email, then home visits for my job, I am now using an increasing amount of technology to keep in touch with my students.  

There is a LOT of digital technology incorporated into home schooling as well (in some homes more than others).  For example, families are using math programs that are completely online and I'm one who encourages kids to try out online reading programs like RAZ Kids and make suggestions for iPad apps that will animate their short stories.  I am faced with the challenge of working with a mom who tells me that her child has been building Egyptian pyramids or Roman aquaducts on Minecraft and I need to assess how much they've really learned from this.  I follow a number of students on DuoLingo as they learn a second language.  And there's many more examples. 

And speaking of dramatic morphing, there's more!  Families used to choose, locate, and purchase their resources on their own.  Now, I manage their budgets, guide curriculum choices, and do all the resource ordering.  Because of the way that the Ministry of Education has changed the amount of grant money that each DL family receives, my school has started a resource library and we have started lending non-consumable resources as opposed to having families spend their grant on textbooks.  The school hired a resource librarian to begin the monstrous task of building a resource library, do all our ordering and cataloging.  and while we can technically search for specific titles in our library's search tool, we Home teachers can't really tell what resources we have IN the library.  We just keep ordering more!  This summer, I invited families to meet me AT our attic-like room where we shelve all these books, games, manipulatives, etc. and we just looked at what we HAD.  And it was awesome.  The school already has so much and so many of my families walked away, borrowing all kinds of resources that no one even realized we had there. 

All of a sudden, I'm in this LIBE477 class that I thought was going to be the beginning of possibly directing my journey away from DL back to a bricks-and-mortar school library. BUT I am realizing that so much of what I'm going to learn in this class can and will directly affect my current job.  I'm getting excited about the possibilities!

Am I jumping around too much in this post?  What was the question again?  ;) "Issues, interests, and opportunities." What I am now realizing is the following: 

 > I use an increasing amount of technology in my job (interest)

 > Kids who school at home are using an increasing amount of technology in their education (interest)

 > Our resource library is one year old and needs some work to make it more accessible to our home schooling families because I can't hang out there with every mom or dad every time we need anything. (issue/opportunity)

These are my three themes (with keywords) that I'm currently thinking about as I approach this class in a whole new light: 

(1) MY USE of technology to improve my communication with families 

  -- Twitter?

  -- Google +?  

  -- how do I encourage parents to join my technological choices?  I can't communicate with anyone via one method if they are not also on board with that method. 

  -- how do I get kids online, communicating with me?  SHOULD I be attempting this?  

  -- FreshGrade? 

  -- assessing how VoiceThread is currently working for me - pros/cons 

(2) STUDENTS using technology for home schooling

  -- how is education changing?  DL is growing - why is that?    

  -- safety online

  -- too much screentime - how to balance

  -- learn more about Google Apps for Education

  -- what about email/texting ettiquette - the quality of texts and emails that I get from PARENTS, let alone students, are atrocious.  How do we improve this?  Or DO we?  Can we?

  -- too much out there - how can I help students/parents weed through the mess that IS the internet?

(3) The SCHOOL's RESOURCE LIBRARY 

  -- how can I help improve? Can I?

  -- what would a better program look like?  

Hopefully, this is a start.  Hopefully, I'm heading in a direction that looks promising. I DO feel a little naive about tech in education.  A lot of terms are getting thrown out there that are totally foreign to me and I have to keep Googling things that people are saying but I will catch up.  At least we know that I have a lot to learn!  :)