Headscratcher???

Today we started a research project with our 11th Honors American Literature/Composition.   To help facilitate the research, we set up our pathfinder to point them toward literary criticism articles on The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye.

Students could go to either http://del.icio.us/creekview_hs_library/Gatsby_criticism or http://del.icio.us/creekview_hs_library/Catcher_in_the_Rye from the  main pathfinder page.  All links work, and students have the passwords if prompted to enter them.  In addition to these resources, we have pulled nonfiction and reference books with literary criticism, too.  We also reminded students that literary criticism is generally not available for free on the world wide web; nearly all of it is accessible through print materials or research databases.  We also reminded them that Sparknotes and other similar products are not literary criticism.

I thought we had made this as easy as possible.

Yet, we still had students SEARCHING GOOGLE for literary criticism!!!

What do you do with this?  How do you overcome this mentality? 

I freely admit I am totally and completely baffled!

Ideas?  Suggestions?

Students Find Social Bookmarking Del.icio.us!

Well, I did not have time to do my quizlet today—we have been covered up with classes—but I just got the ultimate affirmation from a student in the 7th period class that is researching the Jazz Age today!  After she set up her own del.icio.us account and started bookmarking resources, I heard a student exclaim, “This is the new MySpace!”

You know you have made an impression with a tool if they compare it to MySpace! 

Students Get a Taste of Del.icio.us

Today Ruth and I introduced our 11th Jazz Age Research Pathfinder to Ms. Pickart’s 11th Honors American Literature/Composition classes.  Of course, we always want to create effective pathfinders for all our students, but I felt the impetus to do with this group. 

Why?  Of all the students at CRHS, our juniors are the ones I feel we have impacted the least.  We mainly saw them in English classes last year, and that was it.  We have seen them even less this year as juniors when the trend should be the opposite as they should be doing more research and more rigorous coursework.  Let’s also not forget they are now less than two years from being college freshmen!  I was so troubled by the lack of progress I saw with information literacy skills during 2006-07 that  I even raised this concern about this group in my end of the year report last May. 

However, this post is not about that challenge.  Instead, I wanted to briefly blog about how students reacted to our introduction to our Creekview HS Library del.icio.us account and how we integrated it into our pathfinder.   Because the honors juniors seemed to be so resistant to our research databases as sophomores and because we have not seen them using them this academic year, I wanted to be sure to try and bookmark some “goodies” from our GALE databases into our del.icio.us pathfinder for this project as did Ruth.  Sometimes if you can lead the horse to water, he will indeed drink!     I found with that our del.icio.us bookmarks to JSTOR and GALE articles (those are the only databases I can do direct article links for right now) seemed to be a great entry point for our honors sophomores in December, so I thought it would prudent to try this approach with our honors juniors.

While many students tuned out the mini-lessons on the pathfinder in the 5th period class, one student actually wanted to create a del.icio.us account from that class, so I showed him how, and then I showed him how to add our “network” to his so that he could get to our del.icio.us account more easily.  He seemed really excited about having his own account and tapping into it; I also showed him how he could do infomarks with the GALE articles at his request!  Yeah!

The 7th period class seemed more receptive to the mini-lesson, and many of them seemed very impressed by what del.icio.us can do.  They asked some good questions about this service, and I noticed many of them right away to our del.icio.us links, including the ones to specific searches and articles we had bookmarked in our account.  Yes!  I decided to add two additional links to our pathfinder this afternoon:  one is to the “about” page from del.icio.us, and the other links to the “getting started and creating your account” page. 

IfI have any time tomorrow, I will try to create a little quizlet or survey (Quibblo?) they can do quickly to get feedback on how helpful del.icio.us was to them.   Stay tuned!

Aha!: Library 2.0 Moments of the Week!

While I am on the “high” of my “Library 2.0″ moments of the week, I want take time to jot down a few thoughts!

VoiceThread, 12/11/07

For the last few days, I have been working with a student on a VoiceThread project.  This student is one who has not had a successful school experience in the last year.  In an effort to help introduce research concepts, I collaborated with this students’ teacher on a research pathfinder; we decided to have him create a VoiceThread as his learning artifact.  Patiently he researched his topic using books and our research databases; he also used some web resources he liked.  With help from both me and his teacher, he drafted mini-paragraphs so that he could have about 1 minute of narration for the four major strands of information he focused on related to his topic.

The “aha!” moment for me came on 12/11 when we recorded his first slide in VoiceThread.  When he listened to the playback of what he had read and recorded, his eyes lit up, and I saw an excitement in this student I had never seen before.  Last year, he was frequently sullen and not excited about his schoolwork at all—to literally see his eyes light up with joy and pride in his work—words really can’t describe how wonderful it felt to see that in this student. 

Thank you, VoiceThread!  This web 2.0 tool helped this student see that research could be fun and helped him feel good about his work—huge steps for this pumpkin!

Google Scholar, Google Library, Google Books, Del.icio.us

I used a combination of Web 2.0 tools to locate information sources not in our collection as well as to tap into existing information sources we do have as part of our virtual collection.    I then integrated the RSS feeds for these resources into a pathfinder I created for one of our Honors English teachers.

Conversations I’ve had recently with UGA librarian Nadine Cohen and UGA Professor Mary Ann Fitzgerald have had me thinking about how I could harness the power of Google to point students to quality information sources with more ease.  First, I used Google Scholar and Google Books to search for nonfiction texts that we did not have access to through our databases or print collection.  I then created a “My Google Books Library” to create an online collection that the students could access through a RSS feed link. 

 

If you have not used Google Books, you MUST check it out!  Books are searchable and some can even be downloaded as PDF files; plain text options are also available for viewing.  Students also get “similar books” suggestions available through Google Books, and they also have bibliographic data available at their fingertips for that particular book.  Students can also subscribe to our RSS feed for this feature and keep up with the latest additions to our Google Books!  These tools are powerful because they provide access to materials you might not be able to obtain in print and increase accessibility to these resources to EVERYONE 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

The other tool we have been using as part of our research pathfinders this year is del.icio.us.  Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web 2.0 tool that allows you to bookmark and catalog your favorite web resources with “tags”—think of tags as keywords or subject headings.  You can access these resources from any computer—not just your home computer.  For this assignment, I tagged some articles from our GALE Virtual Reference Library (GALE is the only vendor right now that we can “infomark” directly to articles, but we are hoping more vendors will get on board with this feature). 

I then used Google Scholar to search for scholarly articles related to our research topics.  While we can’t use Google Scholar to interface with our databases in the ways that college libraries can at this point in time, we do have access to JSTOR, a college level database of scholarly research articles covering all disciplines.  Because JSTOR is a vendor partnered with Google Scholar, we can use Google Scholar to search for articles and then “tag” those articles with our del.ici.ous account.  While some would argue doing this takes away the element of students searching for articles on their own, I would counterargue that this method is more of an “entry” into the database that will hopefully entice students to further explore that information source once they have acquired a “comfort zone” by looking at what we have put on the “menu.” 

The teacher was extremely excited about these new tools and felt it was a major improvement on the research pathfinder from last year (we collaborated in 2006 on this same assignment).  The students will be in here tomorrow and Friday, and I think once they have time to get “immersed” in these tools, they too will feel excited and energized about the research project. 

It makes me feel good to know that I can provide our students access to new materials we don’t physically own!  I also am excited that I can use web 2.0 tools to help my students “mine” or find an entry into quality information sources we own but that may be intimidating to students.  I hope that this hybrid of web 2.0 tools will make our database resources and books seem “cooler” and more relevant to our students.

That is today’s Library 2.0 roundup!