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