Hello!
My name is Alana, and I live in Toronto, Ontario. I currently work as a library technician in an academic library and recently celebrated 20 years at my library. In recent years, I’ve been part of our library’s digital literacy team, and one of the best parts of my job is helping to connect learners with technology to help them express themselves creatively through digital media projects. As a mature student, I returned to school to get my adult education and digital technology BA. I wanted to continue my education and decided on the MLIS to explore libraries, keep my skills current, and expand my viewpoint beyond my own library. My main interest is academic librarianship, but feel I can learn from all kinds of libraries.
This course, Hyperlinked Libraries, appealed to me as a way to explore how emerging technology can benefit and empower people. Through my prior education, I’ve gained an interest in digital pedagogy, which looks critically at using educational technology to support and benefit learners. I hope to expand those thoughts beyond education to all aspects of libraries.
Outside of work and school, I live with my partner and our two cats Kitty and Tilda. I enjoy playing board games, reading science fiction and fantasy, and watching musicals.
I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you throughout this course!
Wow! 20 years! That is fantastic. I am very curious about your work on digital media projects. Do you have a particular project that you specialize (for lack of a better word) on?
Hi Carly! Thanks so much.
A lot of my work is in instruction, so I help lead sessions on how to create projects like infographics, videos, websites, and presentations. We focus on using free tools, or at least tools that are free for our students and don’t require previous creation experience. So things like Canva, Adobe Express, Google Sites, PowerPoint, iMovie, etc. A lot of the instruction we do is based on assignments. One of my favorites was supporting students who had created original children’s stories and needed to create animated video versions.
We also create self-paced online tutorials and guides, and this summer, I’m on a team that is working on new tutorials for common topics like design and storytelling that come up in most of our workshops.
Oh my goodness! There is so much about this that I just love. Your mention of animated video, has my creative juices flowing in thinking about how I can incorporate that into next year’s lesson plans.
Thank you for the inspiration,
Carly
I’d love to hear how you use animated videos in your lesson plan Carly! Not sure if this will be helpful as it’s geared more for college students, but there’s an open resource called the Learning Portal that has free tutorials and videos on digital media assignments https://tlp-lpa.ca/digital-skills . The materials are under Creative Commons so you can use them and can request source files if you want to adapt or remix the content https://tlp-lpa.ca/about-us/terms-of-use
Oh man thank you! I totally bookmarked that for the future.
@alana42 Congrats on 20 years!
If you would like to, please focus all of your assignments on the academic library ship. Not required, but I’d like to make it available for any student in class to focus on the type of environment they would eventually like to be working in.
Welcome to #hyperlib!
Thank you so much @michael! I appreciate that we can customize our assignments to our future career goals and interests in the field.