Discussing Engage with Jennifer Gomez of the School of the Arts Media Center



  1. What are some examples of the ways in which you are implementing these competencies in your library program?

The Engage competencies are concerned with using information in ethical ways. Students are prevalent consumers and disseminators of information. They write research papers, give presentations, and create other work, signifying their learning using the information they have encountered. Ms. Gomez says that one of the most important things that she does is modeling the ethical use of information in all of her own work. When she makes a book tok, she includes a works cited page. When she distributes printables, she cites all of her sources. Ms. Gomez states that the way she cites sources is nearly to the point of overdone, but she feels that is what she needs to do to get the point across about the importance of recognizing someone else’s work. 


  1. What are some of the resources in your library program that you are using to 

          implement these competencies?

The sites and databases that are linked as resources for the students make it so easy to cite the source. In most of them, you just need to click a button to create a citation. When it's a little more complicated, Ms. Gomez directs them to a step-by-step guide that is included on the library website. She also helped a class, which was making documentaries. For the project, not only did the students need to cite their research sources, but they were also required to include music that needed to be attributed to a source. Since this was something the students had yet to deal with before, Ms. Gomez created an entire website to use while working on this project. 


  1. Do any of the competencies that you are implementing include collaboration with classroom teachers?  If so, please provide examples.

As mentioned above, when the teacher had her students create a documentary, Ms. Gomez was the primary instructor for the ethical use of another’s work via a website and in-person instruction. She is also always available for teachers if they want her to teach ethical use in their classrooms. Ms. Gomez makes collaboration easy with a posted online calendar that teachers can fill out as they need her assistance. There was also a circumstance when a science teacher was disappointed with the quality of resources the students were using. Ms. Gomez tailored a lesson specifically for them about identifying bias in sources. 


  1. What are some of the challenges that you face when trying to implement these competencies?

Ms. Gomez states that her biggest challenge is that the students are not being asked to conduct research until high school, sometimes only in junior or senior year. She thinks it is important to begin these skills at a much younger age, especially since the lessons accompanying the project are foundational skills, like discerning misinformation, disinformation, and bias. To really teach information literacy, the lessons must be frequent, giving students the chance to practice those skills repeatedly over time. 


  1. Are there any other comments that you would like to make regarding the Shared Foundation / Competencies and Domains that we have discussed today?

Ms. Gomez recognizes her unique position as a librarian teaching the Engage competencies at an art school. The students there create works of art all the time. It is easy to make them understand granting respect for someone else’s work because they would not appreciate someone using their creation without giving them credit.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Social Media Tools-Blog #6

Image
  I want to start with a little bit of a sidebar.  When I was a Montessori teacher many years ago, I had many ways to teach writing to my young students. By far, the most popular choice for my kids was to use a shallow box filled with sand for them to practice drawing letters with their fingers. I have a theory that this method was a favorite due to its ephemeral quality: if the student messed up, all they had to do was shake the box, and the evidence was gone forever, with no paper trail. In Lucas John Jensen’s article, Integrating Social Media into Online Education , he sought to make his online classroom’s discourse more dynamic by putting it on Twitter (2019). However, I believe this is just a different stage for the same performance. In an in-person classroom during discussions, students are allowed to speak off the cuff without the worry of it being recorded,  referenced, and dissected word for word, as can happen when it is written in a post. Responses become more ...
Read more
  AASL versus ISTE Standards After looking over all of the materials in Knowledge Quest volume as well as the ISTE and AASL websites, I discovered a big picture similarity along with several crosswalks that can facilitate standards working in collusion with each other. In the big picture of education, both sets of standards enumerate skills that empower the learner to pursue knowledge outside of the traditional, teacher-led classroom. “The empowered learner” is actually the very first ISTE standard listed for students, and I believe that autonomous and engaged pursuit of knowledge is the goal of both sets of standards. The process of acquiring knowledge starts with a question and a plan for answering that question. It then moves through the process of getting it answered or generating further questions, using a critical eye for the quality of answers and attributing it to its source. The final step is applying what is learned to another context. Both ISTE and AASL standards clarify...
Read more

Cyberbullying-Blog #7

Image
  What stood out to me the most about cyberbullying is that it often accompanies face-to-face bullying and that the latter happens more often as the studies cited in the article From the Sandbox to the Inbox have shown (2015). It makes sense that cyberbullying is an extension of school-day occurrences.  This is what is so hard now in the days of social media, for bullied children there is no escape, no respite, even within a child’s own home. I had the misconception that cyberbullying would be more frequent due to the draw of its anonymity and how it allows the perpetrator to avoid the reaction. However, the popularity of the face to face bullying points to something different. The bullies want to experience the reactions, at least in the K-12 studies, which is what I am most interested in.  As the article points out bullying tends to spike from the middle school years through early high school (Faucher et al., 2015), which strikes me that there is a correlation between ...
Read more