Rebecca Jones, the School Rep for the Information Literacy Group, visited Tokyo in August 2016 for the Annual International Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL), and has kindly provided a report on the event.
The sponsorship that I received from ILG, SLG and funding from my school, Malvern St James, meant that I was able to share the work that has been produced in the UK to support the national STEM competition TeenTech. The session was attended by approximately 70 delegates.
As the lead of a sub-group set up by ILG I was able to use this collaboration with a national competition as an example of the role that school librarians can have in the promotion of Information Literacy skills outside of the curriculum. TeenTech offers pupils the chance to use their skills to develop new innovations meet a need in the marketplace within categories that have been sponsored by industry.
To enable teams to undertake effective research, the ILG sub-group has developed the Research Smarter sheets that lead teams through the research processes that they need to go through in order to investigate the marketplace and current academic thought, gather primary research and how to protect their ideas. These resources are available free to download. I handed out some
samples of the sheets to delegates to encourage use of this resource in other countries to support research projects. Attendees were genuinely interested in the project and asked questions at the end of the session about the resources that we have developed. The group is continuing to work with TeenTech to develop additional support material that all teams can use to support their research.
The conference was a fantastic opportunity to find out about the challenges and opportunities that face school libraries and school librarians across the globe. It was particularly interesting to gain a deeper understanding of the Japanese system and the impact that legislation has had on provision.
To read about the sessions that I attended, please click on the link to my notes from the conference.