Reflections on ASLA 2025 Energise. Empower. Explore.

Marika SimonPractice / Professional DevelopmentLeave a comment

This weekend I attended my first national-level teacher librarian (TL) conference. I regret that I waited until after my time as a practicing TL to do so.

The conference ran on Friday and Saturday with some pre-conference events on Thursday. I arrived in time to attend the pre-conferencing networking session at Little Creatures brewpub. In a convivial, lighthearted atmosphere I was able to meet other delegates and sponsors and begin to make the connections that would be strengthened over the course of the weekend.

A picture of a VW combi van converted to a pickup carrying kegs with Little Creatures Brewery logos, to the left is a sign saying welcome, to the rear is a brick wall. Fairy lights are strung across from the brick wall near the top of the picture.
Setting the scene – outside the networking event.
Photo taken as selfie of three smiling women wearing glasses - the author plus two colleagues.
Me and some TLs I met at the networking event.

It was a privilege to meet with many current and former CSU students who came to our sponsor’s table to share their experiences at the University and what they were doing currently. I was proud of the thoughtful, empowered teacher librarians and those who were taking a different course – whether that was in public or academic libraries, in school library-related industries, or in pursuing further study. A common theme that arose was how elements of the MEd(TL) course material was being used in the day-to-day work of teacher librarians – whether it was research methodologies providing common terms of reference with a science teacher or advocacy and leadership within the school context, CSU students and alumni were applying their education.

Woman sitting at a table with pamphlets and books displayed, with a banner for Charles Sturt University to the left and Geelong Cats stadium field in the background.
The CSU sponsor table where many connections were made.

I attended some sessions – exploring a panel on digital and media literacy, a session on advocacy, and various research and practical projects surrounding reading culture and supporting reading through school libraries and community partnerships. But the most empowering and energising aspect of the weekend was making connections with CSU students, alumni, other teacher librarians and school library professionals and sponsors (technical support providers, authors, illustrators, booksellers and more).

To me that opportunity for connection is the prime factor for becoming involved in professional associations. If you are a teacher librarian reading this – please join some form (local, state, national, international) of professional network or association and participate in the events and resources it offers. You will find yourself energised, empowered and ready for exploration! I hope to see you at a conference or summit soon!

Large group of smiling people in front of Charles Sturt University banner.
Charles Sturt University-affiliated folk on the Friday afternoon of the conference.

Implementing digital learning materials design principles

Marika SimonLearning in practice / Online Learning / Professional DevelopmentLeave a comment

Last week, I attended my second “Wagga Week” (spending a week on-site at my base campus at Wagga Wagga as part of my CSU remote working agreement). Three days of the week were devoted to a Learning and Teaching Retreat, where academic staff from the School of Information and Communication Studies heard presentations on and engaged in discussion on all manner of topics related to Learning and Teaching. One of the presentations was on “Designing digital learning materials and experiences”, presented by Vi Truong.

Me with some of my colleagues from my first “Wagga week” – Vi is the one on the left in dusty rose.

Inspired by the content in the presentation, I set out to make the slides that I use in my online class meetings more in tune with some of the best practices of digital learning materials design that Vi showed us. Many of the slides in the presentation were very dense in text. They were substantially just blocks of text copied from the Subject Outline, representing the rationale and learning objectives of the subject and the task description for the first assessment. Here is an example:

Initial slide – very dense text, all standard font, little white/negative space.

As you can see, the slide is almost completely filled with a dense paragraph of monotonous black text. Four of Vi’s design principles (Vi Truong, personal communication, November 5, 2024) came to mind as being able to be

relatively easily and quickly implemented to improve the design of this slide. These were:

  • increase the amount of negative/white/background space (I cannot remember the percentage suggested, but it was certainly more than was found on this slide)
  • try to use shorter chunks of text, such as bullet points, rather than long paragraphs
  • use bold font to highlight words/phrases with key importance
  • use colour purposefully to enhance meaning

I set to work incorporating these principles. This section of text is the rationale from the Subject Outline, I reasoned that students have access to the rationale and to the exact wording. My value add in this situation is drawing their attention to key principles, not reading verbatim what they can find in their subject materials. I converted the paragraph to bullet points, adding an extra line between each bullet. (This process spread the information over two slides rather than one.) Then I highlighted key words in bold text. Finally, I looked at the terms that represented the three main themes in the subject and assigned each of them a different colour – purple for the role of the teacher librarian, green for information processes/information literacy and related concepts, orange for reflective practice. I used these colours to highlight these themes/concepts throughout not only this purpose statement, but also the rest of the slides in this presentation. I plan to continue this practice throughout the remaining slide decks for the online classes I lead in this subject. Here are the revised slides:

Slide with bullet points and text highlighted by bold and coloured fonts
Revised slide 1 of 2
Slide with bullet points highlighted with bold and coloured bold text
Revised slide 2 of 2

This is my first time teaching this subject, so I will not really be able to have a sense whether or not this improved my teaching or the students’ learning experience. What I can report anecdotally, however, is that I found it easier to teach to the revised slides than I did to slides more in line with the originals that I used in my subjects last session. I felt that they enabled me to speak more engagingly and to focus on key points. Several students commented on the engaging qualities of my lecture/presentation, so I suspect that these changes did have a qualititative difference. I look forward to incorporating these changes into the slides for the other subject I am teaching this session and continuing to refine my teaching process to optimise the online learning opportunities for my students.

Have you applied design principles to your online or digital learning materials? What has worked well for you? Please share your top tips in the comments :)!

Random reflections based on a poem part 1

Marika SimonRole of TLLeave a comment
A path forks into two paths in a forest with a tree in centre frame.
Carsten Tolkmit from Kiel, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I ran across a poem on my Facebook feed this past week which inspired me to write a reflective blog post on reading in your head vs reading aloud. But now that I have run it down to cite it, it has inspired a whole other reflective tangent. So bear with me as I attempt not to choose only one path in the woods but walk down both in a mega-ramble (apologies to Robert Frost).

Screenshot of a Facebook post on a popular site for Australian primary and secondary English teachers. It is a shared post of a picture of the page of a book with a poem titled Magic about reading dramatically to yourself. The original poster attributes the poem to Shel Silverstein.
Screenshot from Facebook of poem.

This is the post that I saw, I have not captured the name of the person who reposted this to the Facebook group On Butterfly Wings, English and More. My first thought upon reading the poem was, “What a fantastic poem to go with this year’s CBCA Book Week theme, ‘Reading is Magic’.” My second thought was to try reading the poem in my head silently, but dramatically, as per the poem’s instructions.

This exercise led to my first road of reflection. I am a VERY good dramatic reader, one of my favourite parts of being a TL was reading aloud to the students and I had staff members tell me fairly regularly that they loved to happen upon me reading out loud to the students because it was a fantastic experience. However, I actually couldn’t ‘hear’ the poem in my head in the same manner that I would hear it if I read it out loud. I lost the drama, even if I could somewhat approximate the instructions. This made me think of all the focus on visualisation in reading comprehension circles and the issue that this can cause for people with aphantasia (the inability to see images in their mind). Clearly I have some degree of a similar inability to hear things dramatically in my mind.

That made me reflect on why it is so important to have opportunity to hear dramatic reading aloud even beyond early childhood education. There is a perception that once you can read competently, you can “do the voices” in your own head and “watch a movie in your own head”… but that is not always the case. Having a text performed orally (read aloud) or performed dramatically (with some level of props, acting, etc.) is a vital way to bring texts to life and inspire a love for them – even in those whose mental visual and mental aural landscapes are less developed.

My reflection so far has a “what” – thinking about reading silently vs reading aloud and a “so what” – a point for the importance of reading aloud, but no “now what”(University of Hull, n.d.). I think as a “now what” I am contemplating whether there is an avenue of research or inquiry open to me to investigate potential benefits of reading aloud past early childhood education and advocating for reading aloud to remain a key focus of the role of teacher librarians.

This is getting a bit long, so I think I will save my second road of reflection for a part 2 blog post. This time on another key role of the teacher librarian – working on information/media literacy and academic integrity – specifically, citing sources and combatting misinformation and misattribution.

Share in the comments your experiences with reading aloud, listening to texts read aloud and reading silently in your own head. See you in part 2!

References

Burnham, Bo. (April, 2016) Magic. Hello Poetry. https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1624900/magic/

University of Hull. (n.d.). Reflective writing: Rolfe. https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/reflectivewriting/rolfe

Some initial musings on GenAI and the teacher librarian

Marika SimonRole of TL / Technology / UncategorizedLeave a comment
An AI generated image of an open book in a magic hat with magic sparkles, images and text erupting from them with the text "GenAI" in a bold bright colour in the centre of the eruption.
An image representing school libraries engaging with GenAI created via a GenAI prompt in Canva.

It seems that everywhere I look these days there is something new popping up about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Just yesterday I came across the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA)’s submission to the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI), whose three recommendations to the committee focused on:

  • developing and rolling out training for library staff to support communities in AI literacy,
  • funding for ALIA to partner with researchers to “update and expand evidence-based media literacy programs” and roll them out to Australian public libraries, and
  • government consulting with First Nations people and organisations to understand their concerns and implement culturally sensitive actions in adopting generative AI (ALIA, 2024).

While public libraries are similar to school libraries, they are not the same. So how should we, as teacher librarians, respond to genAI? Building on the ALIA recommendations I’d suggest they be modified for teacher librarians (TLs) as follows:

  • develop and implement training for teacher librarians to support their communities (students and staff especially) in AI literacy
  • partner in research projects to update and expand evidence-based media literacy and AI literacy programs for use in school libraries and classrooms
  • help teacher librarians shine a spotlight on ethical concerns through incorporating genAI specific ethical considerations into media-literacy and information-literacy programming in the Library – including presenting the concerns of First Nations people and other historically marginalised groups following ongoing consultation with these groups

In light of these recommendations, here are some things I have noticed regarding these points and some thoughts on next actions to take.

I have seen a lot of buzz regarding GenAI and media literacy in recent professional conferences and learning events, which is making a start on the first recommendation Hopefully this will continue and will spill over into TLs feeling competent and empowered to support their communities, and to share how this is working. I hope to aid this effort by helping to share relevant information with communities of practice through blogging, social media interaction, contributing to the literature and participating in and presenting at conferences to help build capacity in TLs.

I have definitely seen research popping up about GenAI and libraries and education, but I am not certain if it is aimed at the second point – updating, expanding and/or creating evidence-based media literacy and AI literacy programs to use in schools. This could be a good thing to look into with a bit of a literature dive or perhaps getting into an evidence-collection and/or program developing project. This may be an area to partner with a TL in creating and gathering evidence on updated programs that include genAI literacy.

The TL team at CSU has recently published an article looking at the teacher librarian’s role in navigating genAI. Their work focuses on various ethical concerns and provides some suggestions for ways that TLs can incorporate various genAI tools into the ethical consideration streams of information literacy programs (Oddone, Garrison, &Gagen-Spriggs, 2024). Assisting TLs to integrate these suggestions into their programming would be a great next step.

Since every time I turn around there are more things to read about Generative AI and the response of various sectors to its presence, I am sure that it will find its way onto my blog page again soon. Perhaps you could drop me a comment about your thoughts regarding GenAI in your context – or let me know if you’d like to explore partnering on a project incorporating GenAI into your teaching program in a school library.

 

References

Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). (2024). Submission to the select committee on adopting artificial intelligence (AI). https://read.alia.org.au/alia-select-committee-submission-adopting-artificial-intelligence

Oddone,K., Garrison, K., & Gagen -Spriggs, K. (2024). Navigating generative AI: the teacher librarian’s role in cultivating ethical and critical practices. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 73(1), 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2023.22890930.1080/24750158.2023.2289093 

Thoughts on Lit Up! Stories Behind the Stories at SLNSW

Marika SimonUncategorizedLeave a comment
Making Magic with Fairy LightsSource: https://www.pickpik.com/magic-fairy-lights-time-decoration-lights-bokeh-81752

Transition is not the best vantage point from which to view a conference. On 3 May, I had three more days of being a teacher librarian and 24 days left before becoming a university lecturer in teacher librarianship. Therefore, while I did enjoy many of the presentations, I don’t feel I got as much out of the conference as I would usually do when participating as someone fully invested in a current position.

That said, I did find it very powerful to hear some of the stories behind the stories presented by the authors, illustrators and curators in the sessions. From the keynote sessions to the workshops to the tours, every session had something to offer. It was an enlightening day.

My overall takeaway was to renew my passion for the power of story. Stories shape our lives and journeys and give us inspiration to innovate, change, explore and recreate ourselves and our knowledge. I was especially inspired by Bruce Whatley’s journey as an illustrator and artist – his passion for experimentation and for finding different ways of working to accommodate not just the stories he wanted to tell, but also his changing physical capabilities – gave me courage about plunging into my own new career adventure. It is something that I think would be valuable to share with students, as well, to let them know that they do not need to be feel pigeonholed by either their failures or their successes. Just because they have done something well doesn’t mean they are stuck doing that for the rest of their school journey… or even their lives. We can light up our paths with experimentation and reinvention.

Onward I go – continuing to write my story with a new chapter at Charles Sturt University.

I’m ba-ack!

Marika SimonUncategorizedLeave a comment

Well! That was a longish hiatus. To be honest, I had left this blog for so long that I forgot where to find it.

 

via GIPHY

After several unfruitful attempts (that uncovered my old crafting blog and a WordPress site that I opened but never actually developed), I finally hit on searching my emails for the term blog and that eventually led me back here!

I am about to have a major change come up in my career path and it made me think that it might be time to dust off the keyboard and try blogging again. We’ll see if I can keep track of where I’ve put my thoughts a little better this time around! Hopefully I can be more consistent and frequent as well.

Picture of author.
Hello again!

 

Plans for Dr Seuss Day/Week

Marika SimonUncategorizedLeave a comment

Hi all!


Birthday Cake by Will Clayton is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Dr Seuss’ birthday is coming up on 2 March and I have Dr Seuss-based lessons planned for Library throughout the week. This will also be my first week with the students this year (hopefully) as I injured my foot a couple of weeks ago and am hoping for the go-ahead from my physio to go back to work in March!

EDITED 23/02/2021 TO ADD: Mary Verdun, a member of a Facebook Group where I posted the Stage 3 slideshow posted a link to the following paper which looks at racism, anti-semitism and orientalism in the work of Dr Seuss/Theodore Giesel. It is an interesting read and raises questions that I am thinking through and which may change my decision on whether to use these plans next week. The paper’s citation is:  Ishizuka, Katie and Stephens*, Ramón (2019) “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature: Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 4.
Available at: https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss2/4.

For Kindergarten, I will be focusing on rhyme and onomatopoeia with the entertaining Mr Brown Can Moo, Can You? Last year’s group seemed to enjoy this book and it is good to dramatise and use with a bit of call-and-response, which suits the younger As a reading response, I will be having them assemble and colour some flipbooks I found here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Flip-Book-for-Mr-Brown-can-Moo-Can-you-by-Seuss-Sight-Words-Vocab-FUN-2423162 . I think I will only choose 4 – 6 of the possible phrases because we don’t have a long time once we’ve read the story and students borrow. This will be my first meeting with this cohort of Kindergartners… I hope they like it!

Stage 1 will be listening to the madcap Ten Apples Up on Top and making a connection between the text and themselves. I was inspired by a worksheet I saw on Twinkl to create my own, simpler version (to suit my cohort and time availability) that can be used for various books.

photo of worksheet
Screenshot of worksheet for Stage 1

S1 Text to Self Connection.

Time willing, we will read The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins with Stage 2. I read this to Stage 2 two years ago and they seemed to engage with it, so I am hoping it will tickle the fancy of this year’s cohort as well. I was struck at the time with the juxtaposition of some beautiful descriptive passages with black and white illustrations (highlighted with touches of red). Therefore my focus tasks this year will be on visualisation and description – with a choice between drawing a hat and describing it OR reading a descriptive passage from the text, drawing a picture to match it, then highlighting the words and phrases from the passage that are evident in the picture.

photo of draw anbd describe worksheet
photo of S2 draw and describe worksheet

S2 500 Hats Draw and Describe

Finally, I decided to go a bit more mature for Stage 3. We will be looking at a biography of Dr Seuss from the Seussville website and then at some of the politicsl cartoons that he created in the World War II era. You can find a good collection of these at the University of California San Diego Library Digital Collections site. I have created a slide presentation that can be accessed below. Hopefully this will not be too mature for the students and they will find it engaging to see a different side of a familiar author.

What this country needs is a good mental insecticide, June 11, 1942, Dr. Seuss Political Cartoons. Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library

Dr Seuss Political Cartoons (PowerPoint presentation)

Well, that is all from me, folks! I’d love to hear if you have any plans for celebrating Dr Seuss in your libraries.

Using data and comparing yourself to yourself

Marika SimonUncategorizedLeave a comment

My school is working through the professional learning modules prepared by the NSW Department of Education to accompany the What works best: 2020 update published this year by the Centre for Eduaction Statistics and Evaluation (CESE)(2020). I found my reflections on certain areas – especially assessment and effective feedback to be tricky to complete because my library lessons are release from face-to-face teaching (RFF) and cover transitions to and from classes, borrowing/returning of library books and whatever lesson and learning activity I offer all within an hour. In my current model, the response activity to the lesson is not always done by all students (and certainly very rarely completed by all students) because browsing the shelves and borrowing is done at the same time as the response activity (to control traffic in our current small space).

I was especially thrown when asked what evidence I have for my impact on student learning outcomes. My initial answer was that I don’t really have any, but today I was thinking that I may have some data to show after all (offering somewhat indirect evidence).

This reminded me of my post from a similar time last year when I finally got the courage to check on comparative borrowing statistics between the year prior to my hiring and my first year on the job. My thoughts on evidence this year came from finding the courage to look at the records for previous years’ Premier’s Reading Challenge (PRC) completion to assess whether my efforts, which I deemed underwhelming, had made any difference to participation in Years 3 – 6. To my utter shock and surprise, I found that more Year 3-6 students had completed the challenge this year, compared to last year. Also, in both of my years of overseeing the challenge there were more Year 3-6 completers than in the three years prior to my arrival. I was feeling like a failure because I was comparing my efforts to promote the PRC with that of other teacher librarians at other schools on social media – when I compared myself with my own school context, however, I could see evidence of growth.

When I saw that data, I realised that data regarding borrowing patterns and participation in PRC and other literacy-based activities could be used as evidence of my impact on student outcomes. While not as direct as reading or writing test scores, data regarding students accessing and reading a variety of quality texts shows evidence of my impact on their literacy outcomes, especially if taken in combination with improvements in test scores.

So my main takeaways from this experience:

  1. Don’t sell myself short – think creatively about how what I do contributes to learning outcomes.
  2. Realise that the data and evidence I can show will be different to that of a classroom teacher – and that is okay.
  3. Don’t compare myself and my school context to other school contexts, and don’t let myself feel like a failure by comparing my efforts to the successes of others.

References

Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (2020). What works best: 2020 update. NSW Department of Education: cese.nsw.gov.au

Simon, M. (2019, November 24). Confidence and bravery [Blog post]. Mrs Simon says. Retrieved 10 September, 2020 from https://marikasimon.edublogs.org/2019/11/24/confidence-and-bravery/

Drawing as a narrative tool

Marika SimonPracticeLeave a comment
person drawing angel, kids, child, children, elementary, little kidsHD wallpaper: person drawing angel, kids, child, children, elementary, little kids 360x640px (480P) free download from wallpaperflare.com_wallpaper(2)

I came across an interview with Mo Willems thanks to a post on the Facebook Group “On Butterfly Wings – English and More”. It provided food for thought across a variety of topics, but something that particularly struck me was Willem’s comments on drawing as a form of writing and as a narrative process (especially for children).In paragraphs 29 and 30, he states:

I think it’s a mistake to assume that drawing or doodling isn’t a form of writing—I think drawing is a very accessible form of writing. Many writers use storyboards or make maps or sketches, even if they’re only writing prose. There’s an inherent value in drawing that’s really powerful.

Children tend to draw chronologically, which is to say narratively. They’ll start with, “Oh, I’m going to draw a character. Now, is it a hero or a villain? It’s a villain. Well, if it’s a villain, it has a cape. And if it has a cape, it can fly. Let me draw the sky.” And all of that story comes out of having a drawing utensil in your hand. It’s magic.

While I should and would like to do some more research on that, it has inspired me to use drawing as narrative more throughout my K-6 library lessons. I think it is tempting for me to want more text-based responses from students as they get older. However, with a substantial EAL/D and LBOTE population in my school, I think that incorporating more graphic responses would be beneficial as well.

Hopefully this musing is not too light on… I am trying to get back into a blogging mindset after the topsy-turviness of the COVID-19 shakeup of the schools.

For my theoretical audience, LOL, a few questions to comment upon:

  • How do you use drawing in library or writing lessons?
  • Do you have any other readings or thoughts on this topic?
  • Are you willing to demonstrate your creativity through having a go at drawing (and accepting what you have drawn without negative comment) in front of a class?

 

References

Kaplan, E. (2020, February 21). Mo Willems and the lost art of being silly. In Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/mo-willems-lost-art-being-silly?fbclid=IwAR0kVyO1IarXpHGHY6c7xffKAlZkBGZB4i1pDzD67tAanzibbNcfi0Rb6-g

Book recommendations for Kindy

Marika SimonPracticeLeave a comment

I was looking for a low-key way to get my Stage 3 students active in the first library lesson of the year. I decided to ask them each to pick a book that they would recommend for a Kindergarten student and fill out a slip with a few simple reasons for their choice, for instance the book is:

  • funny
  • sad
  • colourful

This also gave me a selection of books to suggest to Kindergarten on their first couple of library visits, and tied it to students who they had been spending time with in buddy activities rather than just from me, who they had only recently met.

I think the idea worked fairly well. Most of the recommended books have been borrowed either by Kindergarten in their first two library sessions, or by Stage One students in their second library visit.

I also took advantage of the concept of Library Lovers’ Day to create a “Books we love” display on the back wall. Students in stages One to Three were asked to write a book or series that they love (and a reason for the older students). Each stage used a different colour post-it and I arranged them in different shapes on the bulletin board. I am thinking of adding some pictures of covers of books we hold in the library that are mentioned on the post-its to complete the display. Here is a picture of what we have so far:

Bulletin board display
FSPS Books we love display. Photo by Marika Simon 2020.