Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog Building Good Search Skills: What Students Need to Know Getty The Internet has made researching subjects deceptively effortless for students — or so it may seem to them at first. Truth is, students who haven’t been taught the skills to conduct good research will invariably come up short. That’s part of the argument made by Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs in The Atlantic, who says the ease of search and user interface of fee-based databases have failed to keep up with those of free search engines. His article is responding to a larger, ongoing conversation about whether the ubiquity of Web search is good or bad for serious research. So what are the hallmarks of a good online search education? SKILL-BUILDING CURRICULUM. A THOROUGH, MULTI-STEP APPROACH. but not all — types of primary sources substantially easier than it’s been in the past, and knowing which are available online and which must be sought in other collections is critical to students’ success. TOOLS FOR UNDERSTANDING SOURCES. TECHNICAL SKILLS FOR ADVANCED SEARCH. Related
Manifesto for 21st Century Teacher Librarians Editor’s Note: This article was originally published as a Tag Team Tech column on www.voyamagazine.com. It has been reprinted and reproduced numerous times and in many places. We are making it available here to ensure that all of our readers have seen it. Manifesto for 21st Century Teacher Librarians By Joyce Kasman Valenza October 2010 A couple of summers back a young school librarian, fresh out of library school, asked a very honest question at one of our state retreats: We’re all doing different stuff. Well into the 21st century, it is clear that the concept of modern teacher librarian practice is not clear. What I know for sure is that if the Joyce who graduated from library school in 1976 (and again with a school specialty in 1988), heck, if the Joyce from the 2007/2008 school year, were to visit my library today, she would be stunned by the differences in my/our practice. And in my humble opinion some aspects of emerging practice are nonnegotiable. Reading Information Landscape 1. 2. 1.
Active Learning | Kristin Fontichiaro's Blog About Learning, Teaching, Making Things, and Libraries Building professional capacityTeacher-librarians are well positioned to impart data literacy to teens, but who’s giving instructors the resources and support that they need to do so?Kristin Fontichiaro, clinical associate professor at University of Michigan’s School of Information, and Jo Angela Oehrli, learning librarian at University of Michigan Library, were up for the task. As principal investigators of the two-year IMLS-funded project “Supporting Librarians in Adding Data Literacy Skills to Information Literacy Instruction,” they set out to design materials for high school librarians looking to foster data and statistical literacy skills in their students.“We were seeing on our own campus that data was becoming a powerful mode of expression and wasn’t working in ways that information literacy always works,” says Fontichiaro.
Field Trip Library Sustainable Teaching | Use the Impossible to Fail Quiz to Give Students Instant Remediation Does your gut (and your assessment) tell you some students didn’t get it the first time you taught it? Would you like to give students remediation exclusively for concepts they don’t understand? Isn’t it impossible to deliver precise remediation to each student in your classroom? The solution to these challenges is the Impossible to Fail Quiz. I had the opportunity to learn about this tool from Chris Aviles at EdCamp New Jersey. The Impossible to Fail Quiz uses two components of Google Forms that had previously been unexplored frontiers for me: “Go to page based on answer” and inserting page breaks. The quiz is impossible to fail because it directs students to a review video when they incorrectly answer a question. Start by opening Google Drive and creating a new Google Form: Follow the pattern of adding a page break and a question for as many questions as you want. Now it is time to add the magic of the Impossible to Fail Quiz: videos! Now return to your multiple choice questions.
Reading Across a Dozen Literacies This article will define each literacy while giving examples of "reading" within each category. It takes special skills to read a swamp or a beach or a desert area. These skills also differ from region to region as the flora and fauna shift. Most of us have heard of swimmers caught in rip tides because they did not know how to read the signs or of visitors enjoying tidal flats suddenly swept up in an incoming tide much larger than anything they knew back home. Artistic Literacy Anyone can look at a painting, a photograph or a movie. But looking, commenting, listening or sitting do not automatically translate into understanding. One can learn to read a photograph - understand its elements and interpret its meanings. Apply your own interpretive skills to this photograph by Rosie Hardy, Seven Deadly Sins, Pride : What choices did this photographer make in setting up the image? Students will observe and make personal decisions about abstract artworks using a four-step critique process: 1. 2. 3.
The 8 Pillars of Digital Literacies May 21, 2014 Edudemic has recently published this wonderful visual that outlines the eight elements of digital literacy. I am posting below for those of you who haven't seen it yet. Essential Elements of Digital Literacy "Cultural – Look at the context in which the literacy is situatedCognitive – How do we think when we are using a device (vs when we are not)?