Lesson 10: Wrap Up

It has been worth my time to explore the online resources that are offered through the South Dakota State Library. There are many valuable resources in this collection. I have already used the World Book for Kids and Students with my students. They have also used SIRS website as well. This past week they have been presenting their PowerPoints they built using these three sites as their primary sources. I have seen a lot of great student work.

The two new sites that stood out were ebooks and WorldCat they are excellent professional resources. I was really surprised by the search capabilities of World Cat. I’m still waiting for my interlibrary loan. Mango Languages was another surprise. The ability to learn just about any of the worlds languages online is a wonderful resource.

I have already begun to spread the word to my staff. I have given out the links with the school passwords. At the moment it is word of mouth. I would like to conduct a training session with the staff to demonstrate some of these resources. Many times just sending out an email pointing out great resources is not effective. Teachers are very busy and taking the time to explore online resource without some guidance is hard. Hopefully there will be time after spring testing and before the school year over.

Thank you for putting this together it has been worth my time to explore these resources.

Lesson 8 Part 3: Camio

Sioux:

The search for “Sioux” in Camio resulted with 63 works. There was a variety of Lakota artworks and artifacts.  The results also resulted in a few non-American Indian related items as well. Primary among them was a writing table. I could not figure out why this was a part of the search results. I even traced it back to the museum the pictures came from.

The results were from a large number of museums. The Smithsonian had large number of items show. There were many clothing items represented in the results. The Double Saddle Bag from the Detroit Institute of Arts was nice example of bead work.

Community use of this resource:

The use for Camio that first occurred to me is for Artist in the School visits. This year we had an artist come in and work with each grade level. She had each grade level imitate a different artist. Camio would have worked really well for this type of activity. The artist would have been able to put together a more extensive presentation for each artist.

Personalizing and Presenting Research

I have a student that is finishing a PowerPoint on Pablo Picasso. That is what I did my search on. There were 1,016 works. I select 10. I compare a couple of his pen and ink drawings. The two images open up in a two page viewer. It was very easy to make comparisons between the two images. For the slide show I used the 10 images. The viewer was easy to use and framed each image to fit the desktop screen. I also made these 10 images into a website.  I saved it to a file but I had a little difficulty using the webpage until I saw the separate webpage icon. The only improvement I could see would be to allow the images to open as a slide show in the web page view.

Common Core Connections

How I would use Camio for “Integration of Knowledge & Ideas” and “Presentation of Knowledge & Ideas” is to search for images that support my curriculum. Early in the year we do genre study. I tried to look for images that would support that. I looked up Brothers Grimm and came up with a book image. Science fiction came up with a couple of images. I think it would require a great deal more searching. The other idea would be to support student research especially if they are studying specific artist. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to filter out nudes which for younger students would be problematic. To be honest at the elementary level I’m not sure how much I can use this tool other than in a fine art discussion. 

Lesson 9 History and Genealogy

 Basic Discovery Exercise

AncestryLibrary

Searching My Name

My name came up with two records from two previous residents in South Dakota. When I clicked on those records I was able to find a couple of more records for residents in Illinois. I could not come up with my marriage license. There seems to be only a few state records showing up. Illinois and Colorado were two states not showing records.  

Grandparent Search

Kenefick is an uncommon name. There are very few of us in the United States. I search for my grandfather and I did find my grandparents marriage license. I did not find their death certificates. I think I would have to do some more digging to find more records. I was really neat to see the actual license.

South Dakota

The results show 220,983,931 results. The first bunch was professional baseball pictures. Most of these were team shots. After the professional baseball pictures were page after page of links to school yearbooks. The one picture I did look at was Raleigh Aitchison who played for Brooklyn Nationals in 1887. This was a two page image with individual player shots on the first page and a team picture on the second. A lot of primary documents here.

HertiageQuest

HeritageQuest consisted of five main tabs: Census, books, Persi, Freedman’s and Revolutionary War. I looked up my last name in all of them. Under the books tab I did find a M. R. Kenefick who was a prominent banker and citizen of Dell Rapids. I’m fairly sure he was a great uncle. Under the census tab I did find some results. Prior to 1940 there were only a few states listed. It looks like HertiageQuest is working on adding more census data.

Sanborn Maps

In Sanborn Maps I looked up Rapid City. I looked up the oldest map which was October of 1835. About the only thing recognizable were the streets. So I focus on the corners of 6^th / Main and 5^th / Main. That is where the Alex Johnson Hotel is. I did ten year jumps. The first map Alex Johnson appears is the September of 1930 map. Looking on the Alex Johnson’s website I found that it was built in 1927.

The navigation panel for Sanborn is a little clunky. The first views are so small you can’t read anything. Then once you zoom in the arrow keys to move up or down or sideways jump too far. After a little practice a user can get the hang of it. I really like maps and it was fun looking at old maps.

Common Core Connections

5.RI.9 Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably.

AncestryLibrary, HeritageQuest and Sanborn Maps are sophisticated and specific search tools. There intent is for experience researchers that are looking for specific things like my Aunt that is mapping out my mom’s side of the family history. Since I teach in an elementary school I feel fifth graders would be about the youngest students to attempt using these research tools with.

The lesson I could see doing would for students to start out similar to our basic discovery exercise. The students would begin with looking themselves up in AncestryLibrary then tracing their family tree a couple of generation. Then within HertiageQuest see if they can find collaborative evidence that supports their findings in AncestryLibrary. The final step would be to find within Sanborn maps of the towns their ancestor lived in at the time they lived. The final product for this could be some type of digital presentation like Prezi or Powerpoint.

Lesson 8 WorldCat with Camio Comeing Later

Basic Discovery Part 1

Advanced Search

The keyword search terms are an extensive list of search options. There are the basic keyword searchers like  “keyword”, “author”, “title”, and “author”.  The ones that I think will be useful for library services would be “title”, “author”, and “ISBN”. This would work well with searching for books. The ones I found to be unique and interesting were the “musical composition” and “corporate and conferences”.

Title Phrase Search

I looked up “The Dark by Lemony Snicket. The search resulted in 1724 libraries worldwide that own this title. The top location for this book was Alexander Mitchell Library. The top libraries start in South Dakota then moves onto local states such as, Iowa, Minnesota, and Montana. The interlibrary loan feature is really useful. The listing itself has the books as a whole but then it also had listing for the different versions of the book published in different country. This looks to be a very useful tool.

Into Result #1

The call number for “ The Dark” by Lemony Snicket is LC: PZ7.S6795; Dewey: [E]. The results for entries for Lemony Snicket was 2549 entries. The first entries were all of his books. Then the entries change to sound recording and library searches. The subject term I click on was “Fear of the Dark” Fiction. The results were of other books that are based on fear of the dark. There was a total 708 entries. 606 entries were books, 53 entries were internet, 35 sound, 12 visual, 2 computer and 1 article. I click on the computer tab to see those entries and it took the viewer to an interactive book called  Pajama Sam. There is a lot of information here.

Discovery Exercise Part 2

OAIster

After selecting OAIster I put in “South Dakota” and came up with 413 records found. The records consisted of a wide range of topics. Majority seemed to be government related documents. I look at the 10^th result which was titled “Sweet Clover in Great Plains Farming”. This report was from the U.S Department of Agriculture. This was a technical bulletin September 1933 that discussed the impact of hay production and usage going back to 1920. This report discussed the uses of sweet hay and the related problems. I can see how OAister could be a powerful search tool for specific topic searches.  

 

Common Core

After searching Common Core State Standards and narrowing the results down to books there were 938 books found. I chose the third result “Digital teaching platforms: customizing learning for each student”. I even requested it as an interlibrary loan. The reason I picked this book is because I have been looking into learning modules. Rapid City Schools library/ media curriculum is split between two basic areas basic library structure/ usage and research. The elementary media specialists this year have been meeting to develop our curriculum. The curriculum is rather broad and the primary grade levels have basically the same curriculum with increasing difficulty. Intermediate grades are also very much the same. This year being my first year I have taught k -1 the same materials and 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th grades the same materials. Next year I’m going to have a problem because I do not want to repeat. My early idea is to set up learning modules for the content. These modules would be in a spiral curriculum format. I really want to give students choice and break away from the traditional teacher from the front of the room model of instruction. I’m really interested in the Khan Academy blended learning model.  Wish me luck ;-)

Camion I will need to do at School

 

 

Lesson 7 -- EBooks on EbscoHost (formerly NetLibrary)

Lesson 7 -- EBooks on EbscoHost (formerly NetLibrary)

Basic Discovery Exercise:

Part 1- Basic Search:

The topic I did my search on was “Multimedia Systems in Education” and I came up with 57 search results. I then change the search filter from relevance to newest. The newest results were publication from 2005. In the area of technology and digital education this is on the edge of being out dated materials. I took a look at The Encyclopedia of Multimedia Technology and Networking. The chapter on “Content Repurposing for Small Devices” turns out to be one of the shortest chapters in the book. It gave only the barest discussions of small hand held devices. There wasn’t any reference to tablets. The technology type books are going to be a little bit dated and viewer is just going to have to be rather selective.

Constitution Day:

When I looked up “Constitution Day” I came up with 38 results. The books I would recommend for further investigation would be The Bill of Rights by By: Kramarae, Cheris; Spender, Dale: The Illustrated Dictionary of Constitutional Concepts by Robert L. Maddex: and maybe the The Reader’s Companion to American History just to get background knowledge about the development of the American constitution.

Western History:

Once I put the search term of Nebraska in I came up with 88 results. Going through the selection I saw that all of them were published by the University of Nebraska. The selection covered a range of topics. Many of them were related to Native American studies. I suspect that many of these selections were written by University professors.

Part 2- Common Core Connections

CC.11.RI.7 Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

In my investigation I found that there was a few books for younger students. Many of the books for young students were in Spanish which would be nice for ESL students. Majority of the e-books are aimed at high-school and above. The assignment I could envision assigning high school students would to pick a topic like the civil war and find at least two books and compare and contrast a key Civil War figure depicted in the book.

Students would quickly begin to understand that researchers interpret history in different ways. That the body of evidence is key to how judging the authors views. An extension of this assignment would be to take these same books and compare them to a high school textbook on the same subject. 

Lesson 6: Gale Virtual Reference Library

Basic Discovery

Getting to Know the Titles:

The volume I selected was World War II Reference Library. Once I selected it the next page was a standard table of contents. Off to the right was a drop down menu that gave the viewer additional selection. In the World War II reference library one of those selections was primary sources. I clicked on primary sources but I couldn’t seem to get it to work. I suspect only certain parts of the volume have primary sources.  One of the areas I looked at was the background to the war. This was comprehensive and well written. I really liked the related subject links on the left hand side. These links quickly took the reader to related readings. The navigation was well done. I could see older students using this reference library for many different types of research projects.

Search Term Box:

I researched Global Warming. There were 180 articles found. The results were not the normal results you would find using a typical search engine. The results were right on topic. They were from multiple different sources and gave the reader a range of articles to investigate the topic. My results included selection like Global Warming from Pollution A to Z, Global Warming from the Dictionary of American History, and Global Climate Change form UXL Encyclopedia of Water Science. This gives the researcher multiple perspectives for investigating one topic. I chose the global warming article in the Dictionary of American History. This article laid out the history of the Global Warming debate from its earliest beginning in 1824 when French scientist Jean-Baptiste Fourier first describes the earth atmosphere as a green house.

The listen feature is the same as SIRS Discoverer listen feature. It is an electronic voice that reads the entire text. The nice feature is it highlights the sentence that is being read. A blue box moves along with each word being read. The reader can easily follow along. This feature works much better than the one found in World Books for Kids.

Searching Other Blogs:

I guess many people are like me and are a little bit behind. I found the Faith Library blog and the author results were similar to what I found. I agree with the author on the difficulty with Gale Virtual Reference Library is narrowing down a search.

Common Core Connections

I did my search on “Critical Thinking”. I ended up with 47 results. Many of these results were not informative. Many of them documents that describe different countries educational systems which listed critical thinking as an area they focus on. The one article I did select that gave some relative information I found in Science Learning in the Encyclopedia of Education. This article relates to the common core anchor standards for reading:

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

1. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
2. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
3. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

The article discusses how young learners construct theories to help make sense of the world. This theory construction is pervasive in all areas. Currently I have students doing research on a topic of their choice to put in a small PowerPoint presentation. My second and third grade students have difficulty with the note taking aspect of the project. This is one of their first tries at taking notes to use in a piece of their own writing.  Many struggle with organizing their information. They have been exposed to titles and subheadings but in their own research they have to develop their own approach for making use of the features of non-fiction. For many this gives them a new appreciation for these features and improves their reading abilities with non-fiction text. As the Gale Article points out they are engage in developing a theory about the use of text features and they engage with them they alter and expand their theory. 

Lesson 5: Proquest

Lesson 5: Proquest

 Part 1 Basic Search:

I did a basic search of Black Hole. I didn’t click on full text or peer review check box. I ended up with over a hundred thousand hits. I looked at the first couple pages of results. The articles were technical in nature. These articles were all from professional journals, and papers publish as a result of conferences and government committees. In my search of Black Holes which is a hard topic I did not find any articles that were not at a high school or higher level.

Search results can be narrow by two different ways. The first is a related search box that provides the users with addition search options for the topic they are looking for. The other way the search can be narrow is with the narrow search panel on the right side. The user can select full text, peer review, source type, or other specific criteria.

I have used Proquest in many of my graduate level courses. Proquest is really geared towards higher level learning. I think for elementary and even most middle schools the search results are at a level that is much more in-depth than they would need for any research projects they would conduct.   

Challenge Cohort is Discovering:

I looked at Elizabeth Wells blog. Her Proquest search led her to the Horn Book Guide. This week in a class I’m taking I was tasked with reviewing the Horn Book Website which has many of the reviews of the guide. Horn book provides a lot of tools for school librarians.

Publications Tab:

In Proquest under the publication search I looked for the New York Times Book review. I searched for children picture books. I’m in the process ordering books for my library. One of the results I found was the New York Times top 10 illustrated books for 2013. These books will fit right in with my book order. The result format is the same as I describe above. The searches can be narrow in a number of ways. The one I have used before and did this time was to narrow the search down by publication date. When I did that with my search I narrow down the results to the past two years.

Part 2: Common Core Connections

SD School Library Content Standards: Grades 9-12

1.12.2 Manage projects/activities by developing a personal plan.(Apply, Analyze)

1.12.3 Generate a scaffold of questions to investigate; modify as needed to broaden or narrow investigation. (Understand)

1.12.4 Locate resources appropriate for purpose using library tools. (Apply)

Proquest would fit in with any type of research project. The data base is has in-depth articles in almost every area. The first step in any research is putting together a plan. Students need to pick a topic, decided how they are going to research the topic and then pick the tools to do that research. In high school level project Proquest would be nice research tool to use. It is similar to tools they will use when the go onto college. The Proquest search options allow the students ways to broaden or narrow their searches. The key word links give them other ways at viewing their topic and widening the scope of their work. The right had panel provides them with a means for narrowing their searches. Once the research is complete the Proquest articles provide them with the means to site the research they used. Proquest would be an excellent research tool for any higher level research project.