Today we were honoured with a special visit by the sub-director and librarian of Maquilishuat School here in El Salvador. During the visit, we were able to show our visitors around the physical and digital LRC as well as share good practices in the running and development of school libraries as resources centres for learning. Our primary focus was on educational provisions for the school community, collection access, and development, community service projects, and digital equipment and resources.
The visit would not have been complete without an opportunity to explore experiential learning ideas featuring some of our favourite digital learning tools including Ozobot, Sphero Mini and Bolt, and Lego Robots, our beloved 3D printers and pens. We also had an opportunity to share our current VR and AR provisions including Oculus Quest, Google Cardboard, and Merge Cubes. These technologies while used by students from 6th-12th grade in certain subjects will soon form the backbone of our proposed LRC Mixed Reality Lab or MR Lab for short.
The MR Lab is an internal project which the LRC Team has begun to develop in conjunction with the ICT department. Through this project, we endeavor to insert AR and VR experiences more predominantly into student learning across disciplines both within and outside of lessons, in a safe, dedicated space, within the LRC. It will provide opportunities to explore both virtual and augmented reality through preexisting experiences across platforms, as well as provide the resources for students to view and interact with their own design projects in 3D and 360-degree formats. We will share more on this in future blog posts, as the project develops further.
As educators, we believe it is vital for schools to work together as part of the larger educational community. This is a vision we share with many of the educational organisations in the country including La Escuela Maquilishuat. Communication, shared initiatives, and support between centres of learning and their libraries are fundamental to meeting the current and projected needs of our school communities and it is important that we explore ways in which to address the challenges facing institutions, together. Our meeting, therefore, would not have been complete without a discussion of the concerns facing libraries today and strategies for further improvement and outreach within our educational communities. As a result, we have also identified further opportunities through which to further extend the relationships that currently exist between our two schools and have planned to meet up again in the new year to discuss additional collaborative initiatives and events between the two schools.
One such opportunity was that of the Sleeping Mat Club in which students work together outside of normal lessons to create sleeping mats out of plastic bags for those less fortunate than themselves.
Here is the link to our Flickr Album of photos of the visit.
We were asked for a tour but prepared an experience for them that we hope not only illustrated many of the functions and purposes of the LRC in an engaging way but also, highlight ways in which they as future librarians can engage members of their communities through experiences which can be adapted across subjects and grades, at a low cost or no cost.
This was an enjoyable experience for all and many important connections were made.
We have encouraged the students to keep in touch and keep us abreast of their professional endeavors. We do hope that the students will take us up on our offer to support them as they move from university to their first library postings.
It is a wonderful thing to hear that we are considered by many, including university professors to be the best school library in the country. The LRC has come a very long way since 2008 and we endeavor to ensure that the innovative learning, resource collections, community engagement, and support continue to develop and improve, in the benefit of our ABC and local communities.
Please click on the link to view more photos from this event.
Written by the LRC Librarians
This year we participated once again in the Salvadoran Library Association's Cultural Week. This year was the 32nd and was declared the Ibero-American Year of Libraries- Libraries Building the Future.
One of the main challenges we focused on was the need to modify our approaches as we went from having personal contact with students and sharing learning experiences, in an environment rich in educational resources available to students, to a more restricted environment via online access and communications.
In doing so we were able to share how this experience not only allowed us to operate fully with modifications during the closure of spaces brought on by the pandemic but also impacted the manner in which we will operate post-pandemic. The result was a series of short workshops in which we taught our colleagues some basic practices for services that can be delivered electronically and with it provided a list of useful, free, resources that can be shared with the rest of the community.
We focused on the ease of use and the potential impact the following tools can bring to any library setting:
-Create interactive spaces with slides and Bitmoji
- Basic photo editing
- Google devices
- Websites
- Canva
It was a pleasure to always share with our fellow librarians and teachers, to create important links here at home and abroad, and continue to learn together as a community.
Taller: Superar los desafíos del encierro. El caso del Centro de Recursos de Aprendizaje de la Academia Britanica Cuscatleca (LRC).
Este año participamos una vez más en la Semana Cultural de la Asociación de Bibliotecarios Salvadoreños. Este año fue el número 32 y fue declarado Año Iberoamericano de las Bibliotecas - Bibliotecas Construyendo el Futuro.
En el contexto de la pandemia, compartimos con la comunidad más amplia de bibliotecarios nuestras experiencias con los desafíos provocados por el cambio de espacios físicos interactivos a espacios virtuales interactivos, así como las herramientas que nos permitieron facilitar estos cambios.
Al hacerlo, reflexionamos sobre los desafíos de la educación en línea, en particular la falta de acceso a nuestros recursos físicos de enseñanza (computadoras, colecciones de libros, equipos de impresión de diseño 3D, conjuntos de electrónica y robótica, la cocina y más) y cómo logramos facilitar acceso electrónico al aprendizaje en estas áreas, aunque de manera diferente.
El principal desafío fue, sin duda, nuestra mentalidad al pasar de tener contacto personal con los estudiantes y compartir experiencias de aprendizaje, en un entorno rico en recursos educativos disponibles para los estudiantes, a un entorno más restringido a través del acceso y las comunicaciones en línea. Al hacerlo, pudimos compartir cómo esta experiencia no solo nos permitió operar completamente con modificaciones durante el cierre de espacios provocado por la pandemia, sino que también impactó la forma en que operaremos después de la pandemia. El resultado fue una serie de talleres cortos en los que les enseñamos a nuestros colegas algunos conceptos básicos para los servicios que se pueden entregar electrónicamente y con ello proporcionamos una lista de recursos útiles y gratuitos que se pueden compartir con el resto de la comunidad.
Al hacerlo, nos centramos en la facilidad de uso y el impacto potencial que las siguientes herramientas pueden aportar a cualquier entorno de biblioteca:
-Crear espacios interactivos con diapositivas y Bitmoji
- Edición de fotos básica
- Dispositivos de Google
- Sitios web
- Canva
Fue un placer compartir siempre con nuestros compañeros bibliotecarios y profesores, para crear vínculos importantes aquí en casa y en el extranjero y seguir aprendiendo juntos como comunidad.
DVA Special Update!
There has been a lot going on this year, often in the background in ICT and at the LRC. It is now the time of the year when we get to showcase some of that work.
Here are some of the highlights for the next two weeks:
1. Earth Day is this Thursday so we have included a few different activities on our website for the students to take part in this week or over the weekend with their families.2. DVA Voting will begin this Wednesday morning and close on Sunday April 25th 6pm. Emails will go out to staff and students tomorrow morning which contain the voting form. The form(which is closed until tomorrow morning) can also be accessed via the DVA Website. *Only members of the school community will be able to log in, view the videos and vote.We have included a short teaser for DVA which highlights certain aspects of each nominated video, which is viewable by anyone with the link.
3. Next week is Book Week , but here is a sneak peak at what is going on behind the scenes. This is a special Book Week that has been put together by the member schools of the Salvadoran IB Schools group and several local organisations. We will be sharing the site with the ABC
community, this Friday. The site itself contains an array of activities for students abnd staff to take part in over the course of the week.During Book Week, we are also running live online sessions with certain grades through the KS3 HoYs in addition to setting up a discussion panel with our 12th grade IB students and those in a school in Paraguay, through the Spanish department.The International Book Store has set up an online book fair for staff and students as well and this to can be accessed directly from our website.4. Finally, we will continue promoting STEAM Fest as of next week with reminders about dates and requirements.
This will be the second time we have had to move both DVA and STEAM Fest online. Both have been revamped to meet the needs of online learning but STEAM Fest has is the event that has morphed the most. In developing this year's STEAM Fest we have done our best to ensure that relveant ICT project work has a place, as well as guided general challenges and guided open challenges as well. You can check out the 2021 Site as well as STEAM Fests past, here.Thanks for all of the hard work you do in promoting these school activities.The DVA, STEAM and LRC Teams greatly appreciate your support.
Each school year the LRC Team prepares a variety of fun activities and resources designed for students to learn more about their brains, how to keep them healthy and challenge them.
This year we are still teaching from home so we again had to find another way to do this. We have found that Google Sites has proven very useful for creating online themed events for the community. Just short of year from the day they locked things down in El Salvador due to COVID-19, we find ourselves publishing our newest resource via Google Sites.
Here is the link to our Brain Awareness Week Page.
We hope that members of our community will enjoy taking part in these activities.
Happy Friday Everyone!
I believe to have found myself as what can only be described as the February planning doldrums, which have been exacerbated by teaching online in COVID-19 times. As with anything I believe that the way to get through something and spark positive change is by taking further action. Doing so, usually get those teacher sails a billowing, so to speak. I hope some of what follows here speaks to anyone else who finds themselves in this situation.
Safer Internet Day is celebrated at the ABC for an entire week each year. This year Safer Internet Day 2021 will be celebrated globally on February 9th, 2021 with a focus on the theme, Together for a better internet"
Here are some driving statements and questions to prompt powerful conversations focused on this topic:
Let's face it the internet is a powerful place to connect with others, but issues can occur.
How could we work together as a class, a school, a country or a planet to make it a better, safer place for everyone to connect?
Can you think of a few ideas that you as a student would be able to do to help make this happen?
This coming week students in each grade will work on a series of short mini lessons during tutor time and Life Skills. In doing so they will explore a variety of positive and negative impacts of the internet, as well as the various ways to conduct themselves in a safe, ethical and positive manner online, while making the most of the positive opportunities that are available.
We encourage you to browse our resources by grade level and engage in conversations with your child which focus on these topics.
We have also provided a list of videos for conversation starters as well as additional resource collections from leading organisations, lower down on the home page, which we hope you will find useful.
Let's make every day a safer internet day, together!
We are back to school in the same online learning modality. Our new hybrid plan has been put on hold as COVID-19 numbers continue to rise word wide and locally.
The LRC has continued with the Books2Go initiative we have been running since late October and we are now working on our weeding plan for this year, the second book order and initiating conversations regarding our annual STEAM Fest as it is quite likely that it along with the Digital Video Awards will take place online.
We are looking into the possibilities for comfortable 3D printed ear savers to use with masks when we are allowed back into school and will be doing some initial test prints with our brand new Makerbot over the next few weeks. Personally I prefer my quickly crocheted ear savers to plastic ones but giving this a go will give us a chance to try out the new printer and compare it to our existing CR-10s and XYZs as well as provide a service to our teachers.
I have downloaded a few recommended savers from the NIH in the USA and they will be the first ones we try out.
