Wyant SLIS Blog

         Melissa (Missy) Young graduated from the program at USC last fall and is in her third year as the librarian at Sand Hill Elementary. She has been so helpful and encouraging throughout the beginning of my school library career.           Missy makes a point to share fiction and nonfiction texts in her lessons with students. She provides many opportunities for students to connect and demonstrate their learning including written responses, STEAM-related activities, collaborative, and hands-on activities. Students can also earn additional time to create in her Makerspace sessions. She shares many of these lessons and activities with the elementary librarians in our district. I am working to incorporate them in my own library as I work to build up my materials.           She also believes in the importance of showing students kid-friendly sites to access for information and uses these for various lessons.          Collaboration is one of Missy's passions and one of my areas of

         After observing Amber Stein at Windsor Hill Arts Infused Elementary, I knew discussing "Curate" would be her strong point. Amber has been a school librarian for 9 years, but was a public librarian for many years prior.                     One of the lessons she taught when I was with her was showing fifth grade students how to gather authoritative information for their research projects. It is one of her main focuses this year. The students have access to many databases through our district including Britanica School Elementary, CultureGrams, Explora for Elementary School, and Gale in Context. She provides instruction on how to access and use these databases. She is passionate about students knowing where to look for information and determining the validity of the information.           One of the challenges with this lesson is that she never sees the final products. She relies on the teachers to communicate with her if the students need further assistance or instruc

          Malinda Schurlknight is the librarian at William Reeves Elementary. When I first accepted the position at my school, many people suggested I reach out to her to get insight into the program at USC. Malinda's been a school librarian for 4 years. I've discussed lessons she's done for the self-contained special education classrooms, so Include seemed like a perfect competency to discuss with her.           Malinda strives to provide books featuring characters with different gender identities, family structures, disabilities, and perspectives. She uses reports from Titlewave to assess her collection periodically. She showcases different family traditions, customs, cultures, and languages on the school's morning show throughout the year. This provides students opportunities to learn about each other and also connect with each other.           One of the things I found interesting from our discussion is her goal to help classroom teachers diversify their classroom l

I explored a lot of different blogs and sites this week to find one that I wanted to share. I finally found one that encompassed everything our resources this week shared also. EveryLibrary posted Library Makerspaces Spark Creativity on the blogging site Medium. Makerspaces provide students with opportunities to engage in STEAM activities in the library. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art, and math. These activities can be part of a collaboration with the classroom teachers, or stand alone activities in the library. Either way, students will benefit. “On top of the academic benefits that a makerspace provides, students are also trained to build a mindset that revolves around teamwork, problem-solving and innovation” (EveryLibrary, 2022). By students creating, discovering, and even playing, they have the opportunity to learn things more authentically that they would in traditional classroom settings and lessons. ( Hlubinka et al., 2013) The learning in Makerspace

  Interacting with the Seven Digital Deadly Sins was eye-opening. While I think the content is too intense or graphic for my elementary kids, the messages are important to share, even with adults including myself. Envy was the one I explored the most because I struggle with it honestly. The biggest message for my students I took away from this Digital Deadly Sin was not to share everything and to realize not everything you see online or what you hear even in person is always accurate. The people on YouTube are planning and editing to make the videos they do. The person who shares tons of pictures from their big vacation may have been miserable during the trip. These types of situations can lead to students getting upset or even depressed. I’ve seen many times when even stories in class about what students did over the weekend can send students into an emotional downward spiral. The study of the Screenshots curriculum was interesting, especially with the comparison between females and

 One thing I’ve realized in education, especially throughout this program, is that accessibility impacts everyone and using different tools benefits everyone in some way. According to the Center for Universal Design, there are seven principals to help achieve accessibility; these include equitable use, flexibility in use, simple and intuitive use, perceptible information, tolerance for error, low physical effort, and size and space for approach and use. (Spina, 2017) When these principals are kept in mind, accessibility can be achieved with the physical space as well as the digital space. Copeland states, “Perhaps the single most important factor in implementing any form of assistive technology, however, is the idea that technologies should be evaluated and selected so that they can best meet the individual needs of our students” (Copeland, 2011, p. 68). My school has many students with many different abilities and many different languages. When looking at assistive technology, it’s im