2020 has been quite a year for everyone. I won’t bore you with my personal story of how 2020 has turned my life upside down, because I am sure you have your own! However I will say that I am writing this blog post from a completely different perspective than I would have expected in […]
Author: KayO
Why this survey might be the most important thing you do today
It is a sad, and well known fact that the role of the Teacher Librarian is in decline in many countries, and library staff often hold the perception that their role and the school library is not valued compared with the work of other educators (Merga, 2019) . In Australia, there is now only one […]
Supporting students through the Research Process
Returning to a K-12 school environment after several years’ teaching at a Masters’ level at University has given me interesting insights into the way younger students engage with the research process. At different stages through their Primary/Elementary years, they are given fantastic opportunities to develop a variety of research skills – they are explicitly taught […]
Covid 19 has changed everything…
The speed at which the Covid 19 Pandemic has transformed our everyday lives is perhaps one of the most overwhelming outcomes of this global event. In a matter of months, economies have been devastated, health systems challenged beyond measure, our lifestyles have become unrecognisably different and technology has become a focal point. We rely upon […]
Privacy – Even more important in 2020
**Disclaimer** The majority of this text was written in 2016 in this blog post. I have added updated information, but what I shared then was even more important today, and so I have reposted it here for Privacy Awareness Week – take time to Reboot Your Privacy!. When I was nine I had a diary […]
Open pedagogies: Transforming and empowering learning
The open movement has been defined as: An informal, worldwide phenomenon characterised by the tendency of individuals and groups to work, collaborate and publish in ways that favour accessibility, sharing, transparency and interoperability. (Couros & Hildebrandt, 2016, p.145) A feature of the open movement which is gaining increasing exposure, is the concept of open educational […]
One for the books: Schools need libraries too!
If you travel in library circles, an article published across various Fairfax publications on the weekend has been doing the rounds in your social media this week. The ‘cleverly’ titled: One for the books: The unlikely renaissance of libraries in the digital age is just one of a number of library themed articles published recently, […]
Inquiring towards Innovation
As an educator, librarian, researcher and learner, I have engaged with and taught about inquiry learning in many ways. Valuing openness and access, I share some of this teaching online; here you can see the most recent iteration of LCN616 Inquiry Learning, which I am currently teaching. I place a great deal of value in […]
School library collection development: It’s not as simple as you might think
This semester, I have been lecturing in the unit EUN617, Managing and Organising Collections as part of the Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) course at Queensland University of Technology. From the outside looking in, collection development seems pretty straight forward. Why would you need tertiary level study to understand how to buy books and resources […]
We create our future: Why we need to embrace critical digital pedagogy
Why do I believe we need to embrace critical digital pedagogy in the design and experience of learning and teaching? Perhaps it is because I don’t want to live in a future like this: Science Fiction Fact? How would such a future come to be? A future dominated by commerce and competition, a future where […]