Online referencing generator
Access to information has never been easier for students as traditional print resources are supplemented with information from a plethora of World Wide Web sources. However, the ease of information access has developed a 'cut-and-paste' mentality to research, resulting in a rise in plagiarism among the student population. In order to minimise this problem, students need to be aware of the importance of acknowledging sources and, in particular, the conventions of referencing. This in itself can be problematic as teachers and teacher librarians often struggle to offer advice on referencing the ever-growing range of information sources.
Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write
If you hand me the original paperback edition of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow I can, quickly and without too much scrabbling, find you the page where the hero loses the girl. My disappointment on his behalf has lingered physically on that page for the past 20 years. Likewise, in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, there is a long section where a platoon of the Red Army defends “House 6/1”, establishing a temporary zone of political freedom there.
The Urgency of Digital and Media-Literacy Skills
What a fantastic year that has begun – already full of so much possibility and no lack of challenges either! I am faced with the realities of my own personal beliefs that we are in an era of urgent need for digital and media literacy skills. As a result, I know that I have to make changes to my pedagogy that facilitate students acquiring the necessary skills, while still increasing their achievement. I am a big believer in the power of digital media, and the fact that our students are rapidly moving toward a full digital existence, if we aren’t already almost there yet. I know that I already access most things digitally.
Thing 31: Evidence Based Practice – Getting Started
If school librarians can’t prove they make a difference, they may cease to exist.(Ross Todd – The Evidence-Based Manifesto for School Librarians SLJ, 2008) This first lesson in our latest Cool Tools track was inspired by conversations that started at a recent workshop by Jennifer LaGarde on annual reports and collecting data.
Multiple Journalism
A view in text and visuals of the history of bush fires in Australia During the great bush fire, Grandpa Tim Holmes used his smartphone to take pictures of his wife Tammy and five grandchildren clinging onto the jetty of a lake where they sought refuge from the fire. Right after the fires, the pictures of the Holmes family became world famous, an event that provides the starting point for the multimedia storytelling in Firestorm. The project for an interactive story was launched by The Guardian UK in collaboration with The Guardian Australia, which provided the opportunity to share resources and create a unique and labor-intensive story. The Guardian turned the Holmes family images into a rich magazine-like visual interactive, reconstructing the Holmes’ experience of that dark day. Firestorm creatively embeds a variety of sources in a compelling linear storyline that uses the dramatic photos shot by the family to bring to life a wealth of contextual information.
Online Safety: A Teacher’s Guide to Dealing with Cyberbullying, Sexting, and Student Privacy
Social media and text messages have blurred the lines between students’ school lives and private lives. While most schools take clear steps to protect students at school, more schools are beginning to consider the need to set policies that apply to students’ activities outside of school. When it comes to questionable online activities like cyberbullying and sexting, kids sometimes feel pressured to follow the crowd. Teachers can play a crucial role in setting high expectations for online behavior. Schools can open conversations about online safety so that students learn to set personal boundaries and feel more comfortable reporting incidents like bullying and harassment.
ACRL Report Shows Compelling Evidence of Library Contributions to Student Learning and Success
A new report issued by ACRL, “Documented Library Contributions to Student Learning and Success: Building Evidence with Team-Based Assessment in Action Campus Projects,” shows compelling evidence for library contributions to student learning and success. The report focuses on dozens of projects conducted as part of the program Assessment in Action: Academic Libraries and Student Success (AiA) by teams that participated in the second year of the program, from April 2014 to June 2015. Synthesizing more than 60 individual project reports (fully searchable online) and using past findings from projects completed during the first year of the AiA program as context, the report identifies strong evidence of the positive contributions of academic libraries to student learning and success in four key areas: Students benefit from library instruction in their initial coursework. Join a free ACRL Presents live webcast to hear more from the report authors on Monday, May 9, from 1:00 — 2:00 p.m.
Did technology kill the book or give it new life?
Image copyright lostmyname The book is dead, long live the book. Digital technology has certainly had a profound effect on the traditional book publishing and retailing industries, but has it also given the book a new lease of life? At one point it looked as if the rise of e-books at knock-down prices and e-readers like Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook posed an existential threat to book publishers and sellers.
What is digital literacy?
Digital literacy is the topic that made the ETMOOC learning space so irresistible to me… I think as educators we spout off about wanting our students to be digitally literate, but not many of us (myself included) have a firm grasp about what that actually means, and quite a number of us are still attempting to become digitally literate ourselves. Whatever that means. It turns out, defining digital literacy isn’t such an easy task. The etmooc community was fortunate enough to hear Doug Belshaw speak on this topic in a recent webinar. I’ve followed Doug on Twitter for quite some time, and it turns out his dissertation investigates just what is digital literacy… and his TED talk can be viewed here. Doug explained that digital literacy is quite ambiguous, and he doesn’t have all of the answers when it comes to defining these terms.
