Shared Foundation 4- Curate with Sydney Ellison

Shared Foundation 4- Curate with Sydney Ellison

    For the Shared Foundation, Curate, I interviewed Sydney Ellison an elementary school librarian in Anderson School District One. This is Ms. Ellison’s first year at her current school, she worked in Anderson School District Five as an elementary school librarian before moving to Anderson One.  

    Ms. Ellison talked about research units that she has done with her classes, artificial intelligence lessons, and databases that she uses and shows students. For her research units she focused on teaching students how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources when researching. While she teaches K-5th grade these are still skills that need to be taught or reinforced to highschoolers as well. I talked some about reliable sources to the English class I taught earlier this year in the library. This is the type of lesson that is relevant no matter what grade or subject a student is in. With the rise of AI lessons on it need to be incorporated into the library. AI wasn’t the way it is now so my students would never have had a lesson on this before or dealt with it the way they are now. Ms. Ellison does a lesson where she shows AI and real websites and had students find the differences and what stands out in the AI website. Activities like this would also be useful for the high school students at my school. I also want to start incorporating a lesson on AI and ethics for them as well. And what are good uses of AI and what are not good uses of AI (for example having ChatGPT write a paper for you). She also relies on SC Discus to help fill in the gaps in her non-fiction collection when students need to research something. I will have to start promoting SC Discus more in my library too.  

    When I asked her about resources and told me to rely on other librarians as a resource. This is so very true. I have learned so much and gotten so many ideas from these interviews and my internships. Other librarians are so valuable for ideas, suggestions, and help.  

    Like others she faces problems with a lack of planning time and time to meet with other teachers. I have really struggled with not having time to meet with and plan with the other librarians in my district. She also had struggled with buying books she knows students will like verses what will make the library look good. Her last thoughts were to always take student intestes into account when ordering books for the collection. I noticed that our non-fiction was really research based, and we didn’t have a lot of “fun” non-fiction so I have been buying books, art books, craft books, and other high interest topics of students to read in their free time.