The definition of information literacy – how much does it matter?

I work in the School of Psychology, and a group of us who do similar research meet each week to discuss topics of shared interest. Recently we discussed this article titled What is cognition? The article provides a range of...

Of mice, librarians and geography teachers

My involvement in the Information Literacy Spaces (ILS) project has been an interesting mix of success, failure, frustration, and procrastination, along with opening my eyes to this area. As we enter the last half year of this research project I’d like...

A valuable resource

Do I perceive the role of teaching information literacy skills (ILS) to be part of my job as a school librarian? Absolutely. This is an essential role for which librarians are trained, yet many teachers are unaware of the information...

Rewarding Product over Process is an NCEA assessment flaw.

My participation in the Information Literacy Spaces Project turned 2018 into a year of exciting challenge and change about the way I approached teaching my Year 13 English Students. I collaborated and co-taught NCEA Level 3 standards with our school...

Sharing the effort to get the reward: the librarian, my students, and I

When I first started teaching research skills I noticed that students, who were supposedly digital natives, did not know how to find information, and when they did find any they did not know how to tell if it was any...

To Infinity and Beyond!

To Infinity and Beyond was not the first title I thought of when contemplating what to name this blog post. As someone who manages to always find a quote, song or movie title for most occasions, I had three possible...

Why science teachers need both information literacy skills and content-specific knowledge

I was marking Year 12 Biology NCEA reports on the extreme environment of the deep ocean and reading about the goblin shark and the adaptations they have to survive in this dark inhospitable place when it struck me that I...

How do we put a spotlight on literacy?

It’s a month now since I returned from the (very) sunny Northern Hemisphere, and the tan lines have all but faded away. The trip certainly included plenty of fun (and shopping!), but most of all it was an opportunity to...

Making the implicit explicit: Reactions to chemistry report writing and collaborative learning

It’s fair to say that when I left teachers college three years ago I had greatly underestimated how much focus there would be on teaching literacy strategies. As a science specialist, I had been taught some scientific literacy, but mostly...