One of the blessings of being an Upper School librarian at Lakeside is that I have the distinct privilege of working with two other librarians – Heather Hersey, the library director and Julie Nanavati, the lead teacher librarian. Working as a team allows us to get out of the typical library structure where librarians are tied to a space for supervision reasons and spend a significant amount of time in classrooms with students. Translation – more teaching and less shushing. For example, I recently worked with Bob Henry’s sophomore history classes on their imperialism project inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Achichie’s Danger of a Single Story TED talk. I conducted a research workshop on the benefits of both searching and browsing e-books as well as how to find primary sources. The lion’s share of the lesson planning was done by the lovely and talented, Heather Hersey, and I was able to put my own spin on it. As a library team, our schedules aren’t always synced, and we find that we do a tremendous amount of collaborative planning online. Recently, we realized that we that we are using four different online collaboration tools with significant regularity. We wanted to be able to pare these down. Less is more, right? After some consideration, we decided to continue using all four because each of them met distinctly different needs.
Here’s what we are currently using and why:
I am a committed evangelist for OneNote. For those of you who know me, you may have heard me say, “OneNote has changed my life.” I’ve consistently struggled with a system for organizing ideas, notes and files. The search function on my desktop has enabled me to get away with this. Until Middle School Librarian and tech guru, Janelle Hagen, introduced me to OneNote, my computer always had a messy desktop. Whenever I did a presentation, I would gather up all the files and put them in one folder. This is the virtual equivalent of cleaning up my untidy home for guests by throwing everything in a closets. A good short term fix but not a sustainable solution. OneNote is the first tool that has changed this for me. It is a virtual backpack, with space for multiple papers, folders, spirals and even separate Trapper Keepers. First, OneNote is an ideal tool for research conferences because each page is a canvas that allows me to keep a record of our discussion with links, pictures and text and email it to the student afterwards. Secondly, I finally keep meeting notes in one consistent, searchable place. Last but not least, multiple users can collaborate on the same notebook making it a perfect place to curate resources.
I have faced a few challenges with OneNote, however. If I don’t set the file up online using Microsoft 365, the sharing process doesn’t work. Also, from time to time the links don’t work when I send them in an email.
Google Drive is a cloud storage tool. Even though Lakeside wasn’t a Google for Education school when I started using Google Drive, I was able to set up an account using my Lakeside email address. I highly recommend this option for keeping work and personal accounts separate. Hands down, this is the best way for multiple people to collaborate online simultaneously.
Similar to Google Drive, Dropbox is a cloud file storage tool. This is where we store final drafts of projects, curricular documents and lesson plans. It isn’t quite as friendly to multiple people editing at the same time.
Haiku Learning is Lakeside’s course management system. The library team uses this as a place for curriculum mapping and as a record of our work with classes. For each major project, we post learning outcomes, lesson plans, dates/timeline, who we worked with, feedback from teachers, our reflections on improvement for next year and student assessments or surveys. Haiku allows users to add content blocks that can include texts, links to files or websites, images, audio/video or embed the web. It is versatile.
The list above only includes the main tools that we use for general file sharing. As a team, we use a variety of other online tools for specific types of collaboration including Prezi (presentation software), NoodleTools (citation generator) and GoAnimate (video animation) to name a few. In the digital age, online collaboration can greatly enhance the ability share ideas as a team. Decisions about what tool to use depends on the needs and the purpose of the deliverable. Oh and humor me, if you haven’t ever used OneNote, check it out… and get ready to live.