Ellen Scott- Blythewood Middle School
Blog 2: Ellen Scott- Blythewood Middle School
Ellen Scott is the librarian at Blythewood Middle School in
Richland School District Two. When I got to sit down with Mrs. Scott, it was
very eye-opening.
First of all, during the interview I asked Mrs. Scott what lead
her to become a school librarian. She said that she took a job at another
school in Richland School District Two as a technology assistant. What she did
not know is that that job would be split--half of her time she would be a
technology assistant and the other half of the time she would be the assistant
in the library at that school. When she was the library assistant, she was
being able to work with kids and talk to them about books. She said that she
had an undergraduate degree in Economics, so after working with kids and being
encouraged by the librarian at her school, she decided to pursue her Masters in
Library Science at USC. After she finished her degree, she took a job at
Blythewood Middle School.
In the rest of my interview, we focused on the competency
Engage.
Engage:
(Discus, n.d.)
When implementing Engage,
Mrs. Scott makes sure to teach students how to use intellectual property
appropriately. In order to do this, she does lessons on why it is important to
cite resources that they use and how to cite the sources they use. She also
teaches students the difference between real and fake news, too. To teach
students where to find correct information, she makes sure to create lessons to
show students where to find information that is correct. To do this, she
teaches students how to access and use SCDiscus. Along with teaching students where to find
information, she creates lessons for students to show them how to be good
citizens while using their technology for research. In creating and teaching
these lessons, she uses many tools. Some of the tools she mentioned that she
uses is SCDiscus, nonfiction sources, and
Chromebooks. She also said that she
teaches her students that she is a resource, too. She teaches them that they can come to her if
they have any questions on how to cite resources they use in their research.
(American Association of School
Librarians, n.d.)
When Mrs. Scott is implementing Engage, she collaborates with teachers.
These collaboration sessions between her and her teachers consist of forming
lessons that support research projects that the teacher has planned. They talk about what resources the teacher
would like for Mrs. Scott to show kids that would support their research. This
resources include books, websites, databases, etc. She says that sometimes
teachers also want her to teach lessons to students about how to use the
information they find appropriately.
(Wikipedia, n.d.)
Unfortunately, Mrs. Scott says that there are problems with implementing
Engage in her library. She says the biggest problem she sees is that students
love to use Google for everything. Therefore, students are not being able to
find the information they need or they are finding information that is not
true. She says, not that Google is bad resource, but there are more resources
out there that can provide students with correct information. Her goal is to
get her middle school students understand that it is more appropriate using databases
for research instead of Google.
Overall, I feel that Mrs. Scott does a great job implementing Engage in
her library. It is so important as librarians to teach students to step away
from Google for research and to also cite the resources they use. We have to
remember that we are not just here to show students where to find information,
but we are also here to show students how to use it appropriately. I feel that
in talking with Mrs. Scott, she does a great job with this.
References
American Association
of School Librarians. (n.d.). Engage [Image].
https://standards.aasl.org/engage/
Blythewood Middle School. (n.d.). Blythewood Middle School
Chargers [Image].
https://m.facebook.com/BMSPTOBOARD/
Discus. (n.d.). Discus [Image].
https://www.scdiscus.org/discus-logos
Scott, E. (2023,
November 13). [Personal interview by C. Smith].
Wikipedia.
(n.d.). Google search [Image]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Google_Search
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