My Biggest Takeaway

This semester has been one filled with ups and downs. There have been so many changes going on in my life, and so many awesome things we have covered throughout the semester. As I went back through my past blog posts this week, and as I flipped through prior readings, I took some time to think about what my biggest takeaway of the semester was.

When I think about my biggest takeaway, it is honestly a little hard to not feel a bit silly. It feels like what I learned should have been common sense to begin with. But honestly it hit me particularly hard as we went through the course, and especially now as I am reflecting on all we have learned. My takeaway is simply that technical services and youth (and here specifically) school librarianship are inextricably linked.

I know that this seems obvious, and honestly, it is. But I have worked in a large public library for 2 years now, where "technical services" is all its own department, and "youth services", where I work, is something entirely separate. I think that up until this class, I had been thinking of my future school position in the same way. But as a media specialist and a school librarian, you are also the technical services librarian, and it is vital that you be trained properly. Media literacy especially is a topic near to my heart, and makerspaces (both digital and physical) excite me. I also think it was awesome that we were tasked with critiquing some real library websites before crafting our own.

Overall, this course was overwhelmingly valuable in terms of the amount of content we learned, as well as in how enlightening it was regarding the versatile roles of the school librarian.

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