Information Integration

I’m in a session with Donna Desroche from North Battleford. She was a library technologist and, just recently became a technology coordinator. She was having a great time doing this presentation!
Institutional Context - Comprehensive Community School that is very diverse with an alternate option and AP courses. The school was using Linux/redhat - made the change in 2000. This created some difficulty for the teachers who were use to other applications and had to switch. However, now that the system is stable, there is incredible access to the internet. The school has one-to-one acces. The students use the computers to: play games, chat, YouTube, MySpace, and other activities in the library - when done their work.
Teachers were uncertain, unsure, unprepared, uncomfortable. They now do attendance and marks online. They are using it for email. A SELU survey revealed that the things were in place to use technology but the teachers were not ready. Therefore, support for the teachers was needed for technology use. They put in place - Information Literacy Program - for the teachers with representatives from each department in the school. The committee had to learn some things before they began. They did some group learning and then pulled in some grade 9 teachers as the beginning place for the technology. Using online databases were important and the committee saw that there was a need to learn some different literacies.

From this came the formation of the research question and the proposal for the research and a grant. The money was used to release time. They then began to establish information literacy benchmarks and create and conduct research about what was happening with students in the school.

To do the research they decided to use an information Problem Solving Model to work through the process. The Model - Prepare, find, use, share, evaluate - allowed them to see where they were at the start and what eventually took place on different levels. The grant required them to demonstrate learning/non-learning and the model helped them to demonstrate their findings.

Pre-Assessment - Based on Benchmarks using questions adapted the TRAILS benchmark questions - using the quiz portion of Moodle.

Moodle - course management system - which allows you to put all the information on the system that you require. Used the information - combined with information from Data-Driven Dialogue - to look at the data from the pre-assessment. There were some interesting things that the teachers found from this and were able to use. They then put the information on a wiki - which also has supports that teachers requested in order to help teachers to incorporate some of the things that were in the benchmarks and assessment. There were many different lesson plans that were created through this process and used with the students.

They then created the Living Sky School Division Information Literacy Portal using Drupal - the walled garden - keeping the tools within the confines of the school. This is not finished but is a work in progress. This will be used by teachers to help them find and use information more readily. The division continues to work on this, exploring ways to develop technology skills in their students.

Donna’s presentation was informative and interesting. There were several handouts with information. For more information, drop by her website at classroomtechtips.wordpress.com . Thanks Donna for an interesting and informative session.