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Please see Part A here. I have valued all I have learnt during my Post-Graduate study. I have learnt a lot and will take this learning into my career as a Teacher Librarian and as a classroom teacher. I have selected three themes from my learning over the last two years to focus in-depth on and these are Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Digital Environments and Leadership. I feel that these areas have been vital over the last twelve months, especially with COVID-19 and having to rely on ICT and Digital Learning Environments and step up and show how the library and the staff can be the leaders in these fields.
Texts across all the sites I have worked in are "multiform" and this appears to be becoming more of the norm than the exception. Huang (2012) notes that this "multiform" way of accessing texts has had varying levels of success, in multiple settings. However, these digital texts are cheaper than their physical counterparts but what is not always considered is the resources required to store these texts, whether that be physical hard drive or digital cloud space. Our students are digital natives - something that is often forgotten - and therefore it is generally harder to entice them to be active participants in their learning and in the curriculum (Rowan, 2012). Many classroom teachers struggle to embed ICT into their classrooms and their teaching in a way that is more than just a "hook" and this is one area that they can look to their Teacher-Librarian for assistance in. Teacher-Librarians are the one who will have strategies, programs, and curriculum pedagogies that the classroom teacher will be able to utilise. They are also the ones who can confirm if resources are able to be accessed by the site or what they have in their database or collection that would be of benefit to the students. With apps for devices being so variable in terms of price and quality, it is important to be able to know which ones to use and what are appropriate (See blog post about the You Version Bible App + Audio (Mickan, 2019a)).Having this knowledge, going into the 21st century of digital education, is vital for all educators and especially for Teacher-Librarians. In terms of COVID-19, all schools and all Teacher-Librarians had to change how they operated and how they found texts and resources that could be used across the whole school both within the site and at home. It was also important to consider how the students would access their work and whether applications such as Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom would be of benefit and once a decision was made, the changes (if needed) had to be made quickly. Teacher-Librarians, during this time (an any time of major change in the ICT infrastructure) would have been part of spearheading it and ensuring that it was a smooth transition for both staff and students. Students that we teach and interact with are reliant on the ICT infrastructure (i.e., mobiles and private laptops) that they have outside of the classroom as well, especially for social media. It is our duty, as Teacher-Librarians and as classroom teachers to ensure that the students have the skills to use these devices, remain safe online and to use them appropriately. Digital Learning Environments and Digital Citizenship One cannot discuss Digital Learning Environments without mentioning digital citizenship. They are vital and without each other, both would suffer. In a school site, many established teachers are still learning the intricacies of a Digital Learning Environment and to a greater degree, the Internet. This lack knowledge regarding the intricacies of the Internet and Digital Learning Environments can lead to Teacher Librarians and therefore, classroom teachers, not teaching students how to be digitally aware and have the appropriate digital citizenship skills. As Teacher-Librarians (and even as teachers) we need to consider that many of our students are using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as places in which they can get information from (Full thoughts at ETL523 – Module 1 (Mickan, 2020d)). Many students do this without a regard for the validity and the reliability of these social media platforms. These are the sites that we must compete with when trying to help our students learn and become self-efficient learners. Therefore, we need to be able to utilise Digital Learning Environments and the wider Internet in a way that increases student interaction with the content while teaching them how to be excellent digital citizens. We are going to start by looking at Digital Learning Environments then discuss digital citizenship.  "Digital Learning Environment" by Dan Zen is licensed under CC BY 2.0 DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS When looking at Digital Learning Environments, I have discovered for myself how hard it is to be able to be an active participant in the Digital Learning Environment as a person does not have the reliability of a face-to-face conversation with their teacher. However, Digital Learning Environments are vital to the development of our learners. This is due to the post-secondary school training organisations that are taking their learning digital. TAFE's, Universities, and training organisations are taking their learning and their content online (See ETL523 – Module 3 blog post (Mickan, 2020f)). Digital Learning Environments are tricky to get used to and to navigate - for both staff and students - especially during any form of transition periods. We need to ensure that staff and students can access these Environments adequately - and this is where the Teacher-Librarian can step in. Learning how to balance a school-approved Digital Learning Environment and other sources where students gain information from (i.e., social media sites) is vital for all teachers - not just for a certain few. This is something that a Teacher-Librarian can step up and lead information sessions or Professional Development on. A struggle with Digital Learning Environments is that there is a need to keep the content updated and to keep all links relevant. With the current fast pace of the Internet, it is vital that we keep up-to-date with the continual changes. Having long-term staff members that are stuck in their ways can prove a challenge when implementing a Digital Learning Environment as they are not wanting to change how they teach and their professional practice (Elaborated upon in ETL523 - Module 5 blog post (Mickan, 2020g)).  "Exercising the Franchise of Digital Citizenship" by technovore is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP Our students need to have the ability to be Creative Communicators, Computational Thinkers and Digital Citizens (among others) ("ISTE Standards for Students | ISTE", 2020) and how we teach and guide them plays an important part in developing these abilities of our students. It is one thing to have high aims and standards for our students to be able to meet, however, unless they have the fundamental knowledge of how to be safe online and show proper referencing skills across all subject areas. This links directly to teaching them about creative commons for images, video, and audio files as well as in-text and bibliographic referencing. Ensuring that these skills are taught correctly, and students can utilise these accurately is vital. Starting this from a young age is a brilliant mechanism for setting our students for success in their secondary school years and beyond. I have noticed that many of the secondary students struggle with creative commons and in-text and bibliographic referencing, so I was really pleased to see that during my Professional Experience Placement the basics of these skills are being taught to students as young as Year Two's. Each site has a different policy and the one I was at during my time studying ETL523 has a three-strike policy (See ETL523 – Module 2 Blog Post (Mickan, 2020)) and this is (in part) to accommodate the lack of skills that the students have. Rather than penalising them right away in at the start of Year Eight, giving them a chance to learn these skills and means that they are not put off learning and form the belief that they will be penalised for simply handing up an assignment. It may seem that much of this discussion of Digital Learning Environments and Digital Citizenship doesn't speak much to how a Teacher-Librarian would balance their responsibilities, but it highlights some of the challenges that they face when working with staff members in their respective schools. Teacher-Librarians - stereotypically - are part of implementing programs or procedures that affect the whole school and therefore are having to face additional challenges that other school leadership may not face.  "Leadership and Learning" by gcouros is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Leadership Leadership is vital in any school site and Teacher-Librarians play an important leadership role. They take to the forefront of advocacy within the school and the wider community but also play an important role within the site, in regards for the direction that they take regarding policies and ICT. Teacher-Librarians have a vital breadth of knowledge about what the school library and collection as whole require and what can be implemented going forward. This leadership is particularly important, as I saw in my Professional Placement at Aberfoyle Park Primary School Campus Library (See ETL507 - Assignment 5: Professional Placement Report (Section 2 - Theory into Practice) blog post (Mickan, 2020) or ETL507 - Assignment 5: Professional Placement Report (Section 3 - Critical Reflection) blog post (Mickan, 2020). While I was there, plans were being made for a smooth transition to a new (and still unknown as of the writing of this Professional Reflective Portfolio) Teacher-Librarian for the 2021 school year. Plans were being made to finalise what had been started during the 2020 school year and to highlight what could be potential priorities for 2021. This also included ensuring that the budget proposal was written in a way that would be easy to understand for the incoming Teacher-Librarian. One aspect of leadership that is important to remember is the context that you are in. A stand-alone primary school is completely different to a Birth-Year 12 school and completely different again to a school such as Aberfoyle Park Primary School Campus. As I noted in my ETL504 - Module 2 Blog Post (Mickan, 2020e) the context is important as the leadership structure is completely different in each context. During my Professional Placement I saw a mix of Situational Leadership and Transformational Leadership styles. This was because staff within the library relied on each other to stay up to date with what was occurring within the three schools (each had a unique perspective) and to ensure that the library was running smoothly and efficiently. This worked well as workloads and expectations held by the schools were considered (Osburne, 1989) and it was able to be managed and arranged that at least one person who had intimate knowledge of the running of the library and the collection was always in the library. Transformational Leadership was also a featured Leadership style because all library staff were working towards their future goals and how they can make the library more successful through refurbishment, dual language books and improving the parent collection (Molloy, 2019).  "What a Teacher Librarian Does" by Carol (vanhookc) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Overall, these three facets have been what I have kept returning to during my study. I have kept returning to these because they are what shapes how successful a school library is. A school library needs to have a strong ICT set up, especially since going forward much of the teaching and the learning is going to be directed online or administered in a multi-modal format. Digital texts are also becoming more common, especially when it comes to non-fiction texts and texts that accommodate different learning disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). With this in mind, we need to ensure that our fellow teachers and students are digitally literate in how to use the Digital Learning Environments as well as ensuring that staff are competent in teaching digital citizenship to their students. Lastly, ensuring that the leadership is set up in a way to ensure the longevity of the Library and that all needs can be met, is of vital importance. Ensuring that the Teacher-Librarian in charge of the Library is a capable leader and proficient in the use of ICT, Digital Learning Environments and teaching Digital Citizenship is important going forward in the technological world that we now live in. COVID-19 has shown the education industry that we need to change how we teach our students and that we need to utilise different tools than ever before. Teacher-Librarians play a vital role in how schools move forward, adapt, and take on what we have learnt during 2020. References
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Note:The posts dated from 2019-2020 are direct from my Charles Sturt University blog; hosted on their servers. For my own record, I have chosen to re-post them here. Due to this, there may be some formatting problems and for that I apologise. Archives
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