Teaching Library from a Distance

In the Spring of 2020, Librarian Michele Linse realized that her school would be making the sudden switch to virtual learning, and she asked herself, “How do I now organize and share my lessons virtually?”

When Michele’s 2nd-grade classes first went virtual, she gave lessons exclusively through an online newsletter platform. This allowed her to group different subjects, grade levels, and projects together to create quick and visually appealing web pages accessible to students and their families.

In one newsletter, Michele made a 3-day castle “Quest” for her students to complete. She made the adventure using embedded videos and outgoing links to online educational games:

Currently, Michele’s district uses the Google School platform for online lessons. While Michele uses the Doc template to host daily home digital lessons, she prefers a live video-based instruction platform over GClassroom for her enrichment classes.

Along with all of the personalized teaching tools she discovered, Michele is a big fan of the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab for original online learning activities.

Through all of her problem-solving, Michele realized the key to her success was being a small piece of a bigger puzzle: the faculty of the 36 classrooms she works with. In Michele’s words, “My faculty are the ones that lift me up…It is just so hard to stay current in this field as a generalist, so having a team that shares our learning helps everyone.”