This question of professional development and library support is an ongoing conversation in Surrey school district. This year in particular, there has been a roll-out of several brand new ADST materials sent to all schools in the district, and in many cases it has fallen on the Teacher-Librarian to manage these resources.
There have been some initiatives to help teachers become more confident with these tools, including several opportunities for after school workshops and pro-D put on by our district helping teachers. Even beyond the scope of my own school, I have been active in contributing to these workshops as an “expert” (their words not mine!) to answer questions and demonstrate the tool.
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| Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of thepigs |
- The students will help you discover how to use them!
- Beyond the basics, students are almost always keen to jump in and start exploring right away, and they can help you figure out options or techniques that you didn’t even know existed. I know when using Bloxels for the first time, I was very open about not quite knowing how certain features worked at the time, and asked the students to let me know if they figured it out so we could share with the class.
- Exploratory time is massively helpful to my own pro-d with new technology tools.
- Taking the resource home or spending some time exploring and working with it is a very good way to become more familiar with how it works. Back to the same example of Bloxels, it is an intimidating app to start using, but spending the time “playing” in the app was a great way for me to become a lot more familiar with it and teach my colleagues how to use it.
Bloxels video tutorials
http://kids.bloxelsbuilder.com/all-tutorials
Sample lesson (Other lessons need an education account)
http://www.bloxelsbuilder.com/choose-your-own-adventure
Works Cited
thepigs (Photographer). (2012). analogue pixels [Digital Image]. Retrieved from https://flic.kr/p/q1zRnu
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