IA Reads

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Thursday at MAME

The MAME conference opened with Dr. Ross Todd as the keynote speaker. I definitely left the session with things to think about and happy with some of the things that I already do with students in the classroom.

The major point of his session was about teacher-librarian collaboration with classroom teachers. He mentioned that there are 3 levels of interaction between librarians and teachers:
Cooperation
Coordination
Instructional Collaboration

I'm pretty happy that we have a lot of instructional collaboration going on. These are usually the projects that I show off when we have visitors who come to our school. After attending sessions like this one, I am very thankful to be working in an IB school because the IB program embraces the goals of teacher-librarians, information literacy and technology integration. The curriculum is strong in evidence-based practice and inquiry. I believe that the IB program gives school librarians the framework to be an integral part of the curriculum. This is something that I always tell visiting librarians :)

The keynote session closed with the quote "Without evidence we are condemned to be oblivious. With it, we have a shot at being part of the future". –Dr. Ross Todd on the role of school librarians

International Academy East

It's been a while since I have had to time to work on this blog. This is not to say that I have not been doing anything...rather the opposite. I've been splitting my time between 3 IB campuses and working on the things I normally work on. At this point, I have taught 9th graders at all 3 campuses how to do website evaluation, MLA format & plagiarism, what databases are and how to use them. WHEW! It basically took me until October to accomplish this feat.

During this time, I have also been working on opening a new library at our East campus. Not easy considering it needs to be aligned with the IB curriculum. So, that project has been going on since March 08 and it's not quite done. Fortunately the library is finally open, electronic resources are up and running and the lab is functioning as it should.