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School library insights - Addressing the challenge of information literacy

Laurel Ball, Teacher Librarian, Assisi Catholic College

For Laurel, one of the biggest challenges she faces is getting information literacy skills into the classroom.

In this video she shares tips for collaborating with teachers to increase information literacy and how LearnPath has helped her to achieve this.

Join Laurel as she answers the following question:

How big a challenge is information literacy for you and what practices do you have in place to address this?

  • Getting Information literacy skills into the classrooms (0:12)
  • Tips for collaborating with classroom teachers (0.50)
  • Introducing LearnPath (1:23)

Find more information on LearnPath

Read the transcript

So one of the major challenges we’re facing as teacher librarians is getting information literacy skills into the classrooms.

And from my experience, the major way that I can do that is to collaborate with the teachers, with classroom teachers.

If I can get myself as a teacher librarian into the classroom, that’s the main way that information literacy skills can expand and grow throughout the school.

Because not only are the students learning those from me, but I find that the teachers are picking up those tips.

And on researching, one of the ways that I might do that is speaking at staff meetings, or just one on one finding those teachers that want to collaborate with you and work with the teacher librarian.

And I find once I get a couple of those teachers on board, a lot of it is word of mouth, spreading things like that.

We’ve been looking for a way to have something where it’s easy to access, and where students can have a path of learning especially for assessment tasks and assignments.

And recently working with Softlink and using their new product LearnPath, we’ve introduced that at the staff meeting and all of a sudden I’m getting teachers wanting to work with me who haven’t worked with me previously.

For example, our film and TV department are now working with us to design a LearnPath page. And that’s like a one stop shop for the students to get on get started. It’s like a springboard into their assignments.

In the past, we used to use quite complicated software to try and make those, or places like Pinterest, but we found that they’re just a bit clunky and hard for the students to use and access.

And now everything’s in one place. So we’ve been finding that’s a great new thing that we’re doing.