I do not have much experience exploring the library but thankfully, volunteering and being able to check out what my library has to offer was fun experience. During this summer, I explored the children’s library programming for my class on children’s programming, it was great to see storytimes and coming up with my own programs. The one that stood out to me as a classroom library experience is the S.T.E.A.M program my library was doing. And it had children from as little as 5 to the oldest to probably 12 years old. This one was based on Scientific Method, and ecology. Exploring the garden and looking for the bugs and animals around the library garden. I was wondering in my childhood, how I could have loved to learn from this experience myself. The kids were being taught by a few librarians on staff. And it was amazing to see their little brains come up with what they see in the garden.
I know several of the libraries around my area have S.T.E.A.M but this is the first of my experience to explore. It’s interesting to look at articles striving for libraries to create learning spaces for themselves.
In the Huffington Post article, while in 2017 the article is made, they made a note that libraries are “antiquated” which made sense for me due to the response I had above about the S.T.E.A.M. learning experience. Even storytimes brings in fun attributes like exercise, musical instruments and finger dance combos. “Go outside and Learn” is the similar experience I had in a S.T.E.A.M class. While the fairy hunt and discover technology caught my eye. Seeing things like 3D Printers being available to create and having makerspaces more and more with library experience. The libraries do not seem antiquated as they used to be. We can explore a lot of things in libraries to create a infinite learning space to help promote all kinds of literacy, not just reading. Which brings in the next article I would love to explore in my last point to make about classroom libraries.
Pablo Merchán Montes via UnSplash+
Digital literacy is an advancing issue arising especially how much in warped speed we are in with technology as of late. In the 8 digital skills article, it addresses the needs of what it means for our society and how streamlined our world of technology is becoming. And this article from 2016 is correct. We are in the age where we are living in the world wide web, while in percentage probably less than 90 percent but we do have a big number of our world connected to the web.
However, we do have an issue with our internet experience and what happened 4 years after 2016, the covid pandemic and lockdown, that made it a more difficult world online. I do think this article does a great point on how we should work on our digital literacy and teach the new generation how to deal with digital identity. I experienced seeing people in the younger generation than me revealing their identities online so easily or showing their homes. I believe an article like this can create a classroom to teach the younger generation what to do. And I do think the old rules of the internet which I still abide by like stranger danger and understanding concepts like to prevent yourself from being hacked which sadly I have been in a case of identity theft. This would be a great source and creative skill to make in a library classroom.
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