Diplomado en Servicios Innovadores para Bibliotecas

Written by the LRC Team

Spanish 

(Scroll down for the English version.)

El equipo de trabajo del LRC desarrolló e impartió un diplomado de 5 semanas, en coordinación con el Ministerio de Cultura, denominado "Servicios Innovadores para Bibliotecas". El objetivo de éste diplomado  fue dar a conocer y manejar herramientas tecnologicas que le permitan al bibliotecario o educador buscar medios eficaces para realizar su labor, que pueden ser utilizados a través de estrategias análogas y digitales. Como resultado, los profesionales locales tuvieron la oportunidad de explorar una variedad de herramientas fundamentadas en las mejores prácticas pedagógicas e implementadas utilizando experiencias cuidadosamente planificadas, que empoderan al bibliotecario o educador a mejorar el impacto de las experiencias de aprendizaje positivo en su labor diaria con las comunidades.

Este fue un primer paso en abordar con profesionales de todas partes del país, conceptos y temáticas novedosas en dichas áreas, de una manera holística y creativa, suscitando en la persona un interés renovado en el conocimiento de técnicas o tecnologías que a su vez den sentido a su implementación en bibliotecas de todo tipo, con costos relativamente bajos.

El diplomado fue impartido a bibliotecarios, estudiantes y personas interesadas provenientes de distintos ámbitos, como centros educativos, culturales o de investigación, ya sean éstos públicos o privados.

Estos son algunos de los temas impartidos:

• El rol de las emociones en el aprendizaje
• Interacción virtual: cómo hacerla y herramientas necesarias
• Qué es el pensamiento creativo
• Estrategias y metodologías para facilitar el pensamiento creativo, en el contexto de la biblioteca
• Herramientas digitales para desarrollar y aprovechar el pensamiento creativo
• Estrategias de fomento a la lectura apoyadas por tecnología
• Creando proyectos y actividades utilizando la metodología STEAM
• Redes de apoyo para el fomento de la lectura (clubes de lectura, arte, música, robótica, etc.
• Automatización en bibliotecas
• Plataformas en la nube como soporte a la labor del personal de biblioteca
• Los centros de recursos para el aprendizaje,
• Inteligencia artificial,  
• Realidad Virtual (RV), Realidad aumentada (RA) y Realidad mixta (RM). 

La sesión final se realizó en persona en el LRC. Esta experiencia dió la oportunidad a todos los participantes de practicar lo aprendido durante el curso y les permitió realizar las conexiones importantes entre la teoría y las tecnologías exploradas en el curso en línea, con experiencias temáticas de aprendizaje práctico.

Exploracion con:

• Robotica
• Programacion
• RV/RA/RM
• Diseño
• Desarollo y uso Juegos, entre otros.
  Diplomado Servicios innovadores para bibliotecas by the LRC

Los asistentes se mostraron muy satisfechos con la tematica y la metodología, demostrando su motivación a replicar lo aprendido en sus áreas de trabajo. 

Fotos en Flicker

English

The LRC team recently developed and taught a 5-week online diploma program in coordination with the Salvadoran Ministry of Culture, entitled Innovative Services for Libraries. The objective of this diploma program was to update and teach local librarians and educational professionals about current pedagogical practices, which can be employed through analog and digital strategies. In doing so local professionals were provided opportunities to explore a variety of tools cemented in best pedagogical practices, and implemented through carefully planned experiences, empowering the librarian or educator to extend and increase the positive learning impacts of their daily work within communities. 

This was the first step in working with professionals around the country to explore novel concepts and themes in said areas, through a holistic and creative approach, aimed at sparking a renewed interest in the knowledge and application of techniques and technologies for implementation in libraries of all kinds, at a relatively low cost.

The diploma was undertaken by librarians, students, and interested people from different fields, such as educational, cultural, or research centers, both public and private.

These experiences focused on the following topics:

• The role of emotions in learning
• Virtual interaction: how to and tools
• Creative thinking
• Strategies and methodologies to facilitate creative thinking, in the context of the library
• Digital tools to develop and harness creative thinking
• Technology strategies to promote reading
• Creating projects and activities through STEAM 
• Support networks for the promotion of reading (reading clubs, art, music, robotics, etc.)
• Automation in libraries
• Cloud platforms for library staff
• The learning resource centres
• Artificial intelligence  
• Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (XR)

Diplomado Servicios innovadores para bibliotecas by the LRC

The final session was carried out in person in the LRC. This experience provided everyone the opportunity to practice what they learned during the course and allowed attendees to make important connections between the theory and technologies explored in the online course with practical thematic learning experiences.

In-Person Exploration:

• robotics
• programming
• VR/RA/RM
• design
• and Gamification.. among others.

The attendees were highly motivated by the theme and the methodology, which was demonstrated by the creative manner in which they applied their learning across these areas. 

Photos on Flicker

VR, AR and XR

Virtual Reality Oculus VR by Jennifer Garcialrc

Over the last few months Mr. Padilla, our Design/ICT Tech teacher has been busily working to prepare and engage students with the Oculus Quest headsets. 

We have explored how can we use the Oculus (Now Meta) Quest 2 headsets in the classroom, along with some engaging content, like 360 videos, Mozilla Hubs, Mozilla Spoke, Unity, and other tools. There is great potential to use the headsets with our current projects to make walkthroughs, integrate animation, and explore video game design with them. 

There is also some interest in using the devices for EE projects and for certain subjects, particularly when we need to experience how things work (Physics, chemistry, biology), or visit far away places, particularly those difficult to reach or even dangerous, in a safe immersive way.

Our next steps will be to research novel ways to further merge the digital and physical world through haptic technologies and explore spaces and design through the use of Mozilla Hubs.

Further items to improve will be the support for Teacher-led experiences by syncing or controlling all the devices to play a certain resource or content at the same time, improve how we can share the experiences to a wider audience using streaming. Students should also ideally start to produce some content to integrate their projects with this technology.

These headsets motivate all students to explore through augmented, virtual, and mixed reality experiences. Applications for using these devices go far beyond simple gaming and leisure activities and can impact positively across most disciplines including but not inclusive of health, sports and medicine, education and training, design and engineering, history and geography. 

During these last two weeks, our students in 9th and 11th computer science and 11th ITGS have had opportunities to explore the technologies used with these devices as well as practical applications through experiential learning in lessons. 

Students from across the school also had the opportunity to explore this technology during STEAM Fest 2022 at the Oculus Playground. 

Here is the link to our flickr photo gallery for this set of experiences.

VR and AR in LRC

With the arrival of our new Leap Motion devices, and our existing Google Cardboard we have had the opportunities to really explore with our students. These coupled with our existing iPads and QR code Apps, have lead to a series of exciting activities so far, this school year.

Leap Motion in 11th Grade ITGS 

We have been  looking at input devices in 11th grade ITGS. This was a prime opportunity to test out with the leaps and have the kids prepare their own activities. During the session, we worked with both the Leap Motions and MakeyMakey input devices, both of which are powerful learning tools, however, this post is about AR and VR, so we will leave the MakeyMakey discussion for another time.

In order to prepare for the lesson, I provided students with a link to the Leap Motion Gallery and asked them to choose and download a couple of modules they were interested in trying out. It is important to note that there are a great variety of activities to choose from, unfortunately, some are not available for Mac users. It was easy to share the information with students, as we are using Google Classroom to run our lessons and communicate with each other. The kids had a wonderful time exploring different modules. You can view some of the work they did in this mashup video from the input lesson.

*We did find,  that we had to really work initially to get used to the range that the Leap Motion would detect. Students persisted and did get the hang of it rather quickly in the end.





Google Cardboard in 12th Grade ITGS

In 12th grade, we have been looking at wearable technology, what better time to bring out the Cell phones and Google Cardboard.

The kids downloaded the appropriate app to their cell phones for homework and after a brief introduction they partnered up and we took the tech outside. It is important to have kids working in pairs with VR as it is easy for them to trip and bump into things. Our students spotted each other in partners and took turns with the viewers.

The excitement quickly crescendoed,  as students explored using these simple cardboard devices. They were immersed in what they were doing,  actively exploring, evaluating the technology and having a great deal of fun doing so. All we needed to accomplish this was the cheapest of cardboard viewers,  their own cell phones, and the free apps. You can even download templates to help you build your own cardboard viewers.

Here are a few options for doing this:
Instructables
Pocketlint
Google Cardboard Production Kit

Please see the previous post for a short video and further details on this activity.


QR Code Scavenger Hunt-6th Grade LRC Orientation

Each year we host an orientation session in the Learning Resources Centre for the 6th grade students moving up to Secondary.

This year we decided to take advantage of the popularity that has grown around Pokemon Go and use it as our hook. We used our Pokemon theme, along with our existing iPads, a QR Code reader (We prefer i-nigma),  paired with physical QR Codes to build a massive (I kid you not-over 100 students strong!) scavenger hunt.

The  QR codes were used to place scannable text clues within Pokeballs which were distributed around the school, along with Pokemon characters. We used Google Maps to create a perimeter map for the work and determined different routes for each team.

Teams started off with a small Ziploc bag containing their first QR Pokeball clue and a copy of the map. Each team was given an iPad.  It was delightful to watch the students tearing across the field, verifying their positions on the map, discovering their clues and rushing to see which would be the first group to finish. Some of them even ended up in the shrubs outside the headmaster's office. Upon arrival at the LRC(They all ended up here), they had a book related clue to resolve and activity to complete upon finding the right location and identifying the book. They were then given some time to browse the resources on offer.

Here are is a link to the photo gallery for the event.

We have plenty of other activities planned for the school year involving our modest collection of AR and VR devices and applications and are looking forward to discovering, even more applications to use in our regular lessons and special events. The next step is to have t-shirts made for our annual book week, covered in interesting codes and having students scan us as we move about the school.

*One last note, we used to create VR pop-up books using Zooburst, which was a great application, however, the site has since closed.  They do offer an App however that seems to still be available. It is an app worth investigating.

Google Cardboard in ITGS

Last week we spent half an hour testing out and evaluating Google Cardboard in our HL ITGS class. This was  part of our preliminary work on wearable tech. The students viewed a video overview, learned how to use the headsets and the Cardboard App (which runs 360 degree videos), then assembled the devices. Next, we headed outdoors to the grassy area in front of the LRC. Luckily, there was a respite in the rainy weather and the grass was also dry, enabling us to purposefully wander around the grounds, whilst immersed in different VR environments.


It was fascinating to observe the kids as they took tours, spotted their partners and shared their locations and findings, all without leaving the lawn in front of the LRC. This work was punctuate by excited exclamations, location call outs and the regular directions of the spotters.


The next step is to continue the debrief, and record their findings on their response sheets. Interestingly enough, the students were very impressed by these cheap cardboard constructions built for cell phones, despite their awareness of the range of alternative high tech VR devices currently available. It will certainly be interesting to read their written responses to the this experience.