A big part of being a school librarian is helping students learn the skills they need to efficiently use the library resources. Through the program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I have been given many opportunities to put this student learning outcome into practice. During my LIS 635 course, I created a digital curation of copyright materials which I later used to teach copyright to my fourth and fifth-grade students. As part an extension of this assignment I also created a flipped Instruction lesson that served as an introduction to the lesson. The students were to use the copyright curation to gain knowledge of copyright and create an infographic to show what they had learned. The flipped instruction lesson was a lesson on how to use the infographic site pictochart.

 

     During my LIS 693 practicum, I have also been given the opportunity to teach my students explicitly how to search within Destiny using pathways express and lessons on how to evaluate websites. Both of these things are important in making sure your students know how to determine if a source is good for them or not.  During my summer internship at the Mary Duncan Public library, I was given the opportunity to talk with parents about a topic I was knowledgeable about but they were lost with, student reading levels. It was fun for me to educate the parents on what the reading levels meant and to help them find text that was both engaging and appropriate for their budding reader.

 

     In teaching patrons of all types to utilize the materials they have available it helps them to become better informed and gives them the freedom to grow individually. When patrons are taught how to sift through the information they are more likely to continue to search for things they need. I have found most recently that patrons are reluctant to ask for help. In the education realm, the ability to teach a skill prior to assigning a task helps give the students confidence that they have all the tools they need to be successful. How to find, evaluate, and safely use information in the school is important in the students creating things that will help them grow as learners and become well-informed citizens. The ability to process information is a gift that they students will take with them far beyond the elementary school library.