Final Vision Production

It has been a very interesting and engaging term and I’m amazed at how much I have learned in such a short time.  This course is the perfect send off as I finish my diploma program.  This course brought to light many important aspects of being a teacher librarian and how I can be a leader in my school and community of teachers.  Most importantly I learned how to stay connected with others so that I can continue to learn new ways of making learning fun for my students.

My final vision project that I created allowed me to showcase all the learning I did this term: 

• I was able to access different learning networks to get information on inquiry based learning
• I experienced, understood and communicated the importance of inquiry
• Taking the time to fully understand a topic such as inquiry based learning has  given me the confidence to share my knowledge with my colleagues and be more of a leader
• I used technology to communicate the information 

The website that I created about inquiry based learning is a project that I intend to share with my colleagues at my school and also to the teacher-librarians of my district.  It took quite a bit of time to put together so I definitely do not want it to go to waste!

The website (click here) turned out how I wanted with very few technological difficulties.  The main problem was deciding on which sites to include and organizing the information in a user-friendly way.  I hope that I achieved my main goal of getting teachers on board with inquiry based learning and wanting to collaborate on projects.  

A last minute addition to the site is a blog page where I will have the chance to share our inquiry projects with other teachers and even parents.  This page will also allow me to interact with my readers by them having the option of leaving comments. 

In the future I hope to explore other technologies and find new ways of sharing information with students, parents and teachers.  I have been inspired by other classmates’ projects and posts throughout this term.  I can see how taking chances and trying something new can have great rewards.

Thanks to all for sharing your thoughts, ideas and passion for teaching!  I am leaving this program inspired, motivated and ready to start putting all this great knowledge to use!

Merci!

Building My Final Vision Project

As I have been working through my final vision project there have been a number of challenges.  The first and biggest problem was being healthy enough to be able to work on my project!  It has been a rough couple of weeks with our book fair, student conferences, report card printing problems, being sick and then having to take care of my kids who were sick afterwards and not sleeping the night.  Now that I am finally able to work on my project I have found the process for the most part relatively painless with a few bumps along the way.

I have chosen to use Weebly to create my website on inquiry based learning (click here to view my work in progress).  I have used Weebly in the past and I am quite familiar with it.  Since the last time I worked with Weebly there have been some changes and after searching for quite some time to find the missing features that I was used to using, I found a tutorial online and I was able to adapt easily to the improvements made to the program.  I have had a few other formatting issues but nothing particularly troublesome. I had thought about trying out a new program to gain some experience using different programs but I am happy that I didn’t because I could not afford using any extra time to learning a new program.  I would still like to try using other programs in the future to see if they have different features and design that may be more appealing.

I am still amazed at how long it takes to do the research!  I had already started collecting some links but deciding which sites to use can also be time consuming.  Due to lack of time, I have not even begun searching for sites in French.  My goal was to provide links in French and English but I will have to work on that at a later time.  It was also difficult selecting sites that would appeal to a larger number of teachers and not to just a few teachers.  It was important that the information was easy to read and not too academic or tedious.  If teachers have to work too hard to find the information they are looking for then they will give up.  The key word that I keep referring back to for this site is user-friendly.

The last struggle I had was finding ways to make the website visually appealing, professional looking, and easy to navigate.  This part of the process can also take up a lot of time.  The appearance of the website can be almost as important as the content.  Teachers may not want to explore the website if it is not easy to navigate and visually appealing.  Since I am not a designer, it has been a bit of a slow process. In the end, I opted to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.

I truly enjoy creating websites but finding the time to make it the way I want is a struggle that will always be there.  I have to keep in mind that websites are a work in progress. They need regular maintenance like checking links as well as adding new links and making sure that the information is up to date and relevant.  I need to keep this in mind as I’m finishing up my website!