CI 553 Reflections - Week 7

Final Reflection

Whew! I finally finished all my assignments...and not a minute too soon! I get to head back to high school this week! To begin my final reflection, I looked back through my assignments and reference notebook. For me, this course turned out to be a study in research skills. I learned so many things that will transfer to my classroom, and have several really great lessons that I am going to use in my classroom next year. It is always fabulous to take a course that has real value where you are able to transfer ideas and projects into the classroom. I plan to do that with everything I have created for this class!

Some of my highlights (lessons I will DEFINITELY use):

• Review of Library Research Resources
• make a resume of an American author
• a one page research project
• using and analyzing primary documents from the LOC website

What I can use in my class... When I began teaching several years ago I was charged with the "junior research project/paper." This was fairly intimidating for me, and I have struggled through the teaching of it for the past two years. This class gave me the resources and background to feel comfortable and confident teaching research skills to my students. I have realized that research is not just about this one, huge paper students write in the spring. Research is a skill that is taught a little at a time over the course of a career. Students get to be better researchers through continued practice. I am seriously considering overhauling the research in my class and having students write one research handout (as described in my unit lesson Introductory Research and Presentation on Native American History) each quarter. Of course, the topics of research will change. I think that approaching the research in this way will be better for a variety of reasons: the students will practice the skill over time, they will research a variety of topics, they will learn the valuable skill of concise writing, and, due to the shortened time frame for their work, they will be more focused on the topic at hand.

What I can use to develop our school's Library Media Program... As per the things I can use in our library program, I have already been in contact with our school's library media specialist. She is excited to use some of my ideas for our library media program and collaborate with me to build a better program for our students. Especially useful for this will be the "Government Information for Kids and Teens" PPT and the "Information Literacy Rubric." Additionally, she is more than willing to collaborate with me on a library session for juniors that reviews the research resources available to them.

What I can use as a profession and as a graduate student... The research skills and resources that have been introduced and reviewed in this class will help me professionally and with the requirements of the Curriculum & Instruction program. I don't know how many times I have heard the phrase "research-based" in the last several years, but there is no doubt in my mind that is where educational best practice and district policy is headed. Especially helpful in this area will the indexes and databases I can access online through the University of Montana (like ERIC).

Finally... In all, this course was full of information and assignments that I can actually use! This was refreshing and exciting. See you in the classroom!

CI 553 Reflections - Week 6

Assessing Information Literacy Skills

Assessing learning is an essential part of the educational process, including assessment of information literacy skills. I see assessment as having two aspects: formative and summative assessment. Teachers and Library Media Specialists guide students through the learning process using formative assessments (i.e. - rough drafts, peer reviews, individual conferences about student work). For summative assessments, there are a variety of methods of assessment. For writing and projects which seem more subjective, I favor rubrics which are given to the students early on in their work. The rubrics provide clear guidelines and targets, and allow students to work toward measurable goals. I frequently discuss the rubrics with as a whole class and individually with students.

Occasionally, objective assessments, like quizzes and exams, provide a better summation of student learning. The TRAILS (Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills) website does a fine job of providing this kind of objective assessment. In fact, I think it will be interesting to use this assessment with 9th graders as a pre-test in the fall and a post-test in the spring. I may even use it for my 11th graders to try to track the differences between the grades, as well as learning over the course of the year.

That said, I think it is important to teach students to reflect and self-evaluate. There is a fine example of a guided self-reflection based on the Big6 in figure 9-1 of our text (Murray, 2008, p. 90). I think these questions could be easily modified to fit nearly any project. I especially liked that the questions are designed to encourage students to transfer the skills they have learned, practiced or mastered to other projects. Ultimately, I believe that this is the most important skill we can teach our students - how to find information quickly and easily and how to transfer this skill to any subject matter.

Copyright and Plagiarism

The final LM standard deals with the safe, legal and ethical use of information and technology. Personally, I find this to be one of the most challenging standards to teach. Let's face it: we live in the era of copy & paste. It is so easy to just take information, ideas and pictures that students are used to doing it all the time without. It is our job, then, to teach students that they must give their sources credit.

Last year, with the help of one of my colleagues, I found Turnitin.com. This is website that indexes and cross checks student writing with an enormous amount of information: websites, books, encyclopedias, other student works. It then provides students with an originality report based on its findings. In general, I require students' papers to be in the green (less than 10%) to even turn it in to me. It's not perfect, and some papers need to looked at more closely than the program is capable of doing, but it works well as a learning tool. After the first time, students rarely try to give me work that is not their own.

We talk a lot about originality and giving their sources credit. I think the key is to hold students to a high standard. This year, I plan to introduce my students to the Creative Commons as we start to use more images in our work.

On a final note...

I especially liked a few ideas in chapter 9, and think that they can be modified to suit me in the English classroom. One idea that really stood out to me was the WWII Leader resume (Murray, p.93). I would modify this so the eleventh grade students would be writing a resume about an American author. We could then divide into selection committees, and "pick" authors to interview based on their resume! This activity would give my students practice researching, formatting resumes, and selecting candidates to interview. The real-life experience would be fabulous!

CI 553 Reflections - Week 5

Government Documents

For this assignment, I spent time reviewing Jennie Burroughs' powerpoint, "Government Information for Kids (and Teens)" and the Library of Congress page for teachers. I found both resources to have valuable information that, if incorporated into the classroom, would provide students with the sort of authentic experience from which true learning springs.

Burroughs' PPT was a plethora of resources, giving websites and suggests for research for everything from the ocean to NASA to CIA intelligence. There are links to sites about American Memory (LOC) and the history of Montana. Some of the sites were more appropriate for elementary schools children, and others had the more in-depth information that high school students need for research projects. In all, I was impressed with the depth and scope of the resources included in this document. As I began to wade through all the information, my brain started turning round and round about how to use this powerful resource. There is SO much information that actually presenting this as a PPT seems like too much. However, I think that it would be a great starting place for my juniors to begin their research projects. Often, the students don't know where to start. This document provides plenty of fantastic ideas about all sorts of things!

In addition to the possibilities of using this PPT for our junior research project, I began to see others ways to incorporate some of its suggested resources into the classroom. LOC's American Memory, Montana History Wiki, and the Montana Historical Society seem to be especially relevant to the English classroom where we spend a great deal of time discussing the settings and historical situations of the novels we read.

Primary resources are great way to help students connect to the past. Seeing pictures, letters and other documents reminds us of the people who lived through times past. Primary documents lend an authenticity that connect us with others. Ultimately, it is this connection that sows the seeds of questions in all our minds.

On the LOC teacher's page, I found a ton of information that will help me incorporate primary documents into my classes. I especially liked the thematic lessons resource that has lots of great ideas. I already use a modified version of their suggested lesson for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and have found to be a great way to get students to visualize the times of the novel.

Photo Credit: Thanks to Flikr user Chris McCorkle for his photo Library of Congress; it is available through a Creative Commons License.

My First Aviary Project

CI 553 Reflections - Week 4

Library, Media and Technology Standards for Teachers

I haven't spent much time in my journals addressing the IL/LM standards for teachers and pre-service teachers; rather, I have focused much of my attention on the LM standards for students. As there is no student LM standard for the week, it seems like the perfect time to look more closely at the standards intended for teachers. First, I think that it is a great idea to have standards geared at the development of educators. It gives teachers the same sort of delineated, clear guidelines for their own learning as the student standards outline for the skills that they are teaching. These standards universally address the knowledge and skills of the "information literate pk-12 pre-service teacher."

The pre-service teacher is expected to have the same repertoire of skills as the information literate student, like identifying the task, locating sources, using information and ethically using that information. In addition, the pre-service teacher is expected to be able select and present appropriate information for students, analyze and organize information to encourage appropriate use, articulate the need for information, as well as plan strategies and select to tools to find appropriate information. In essence, the pre-service teacher needs to be able to teach students about information, and select and use appropriate sources.

I think that all of these standards are quite valuable in many subjects. In my English classes, for example, we are constantly doing formal and informal research. Achieving a level of proficiency with the IL/LM standards for pre-service teachers ensures that I am able to guide student learning in such a way that the Montana IL/LM standards for students are being met. That said, there was little attention paid to these standards in my undergraduate training. When I began to teach, teaching formal research, or even just using indexes and databases from our school library, was like initiation by fire: in a word, intimidating. I think that teacher programs would benefit from focusing more on the standards provided for pre-service teachers. As professionals, we would enhance the learning of our students if we were proficient at all the skills clearly outlined in the LM/IL standards.

For me, this class is helping me achieve proficiency with many different research tools: indexes, databases, ready reference, biographical/geographical resources, etc. This will translate nicely to my classroom. For example, the short lesson I designed will clearly introduce my students to some the resources in the library that they otherwise just hear a lecture over. The hands-on aspect of my lesson will ensure that the students actually use the different tools available to them. I hope my unit lesson will further this goal of introducing students to all the information available to them, and help them realize that there really is a plethora of sources out there.

Using Biographical and Geographical Resources

Much of the biographical information that I found was online through the Biography Research Center index at the Mansfield Library. I was impressed by how much information was available and the number of sources that were indexed. I really like how there were tabs for short bios as well: I can see this being very helpful for my students when they are doing quick research. The Literature Resource Center was another tool that I know will be quite helpful for my English classes. I thought it was great how it provided biographical information, criticism, and media info. I think that I will be able to use this in my lesson planning too.

As per the geographical resources, I am quite familiar with both google earth and mapquest, though I don't know exactly how I would tie this into to English classroom. Perhaps we could document the setting of the stories we read, or where the authors live(d). I did find a GREAT resource from Merriam-Webster's Visual Online Dictionary. It has all sorts of great stuff. I spent quite a bit of time looking Geography found under the Earth subject tab. This is just the beginning though - there is all sorts of stuff here. I will definitely show this one to my students, though again, I don't have a specific purpose in mind.

On a side note, all this work with specific indexes and databases makes me wonder precisely what my school subscribes to, especially as I begin to plan lessons for my students. I know that we have Infotrac for students, and I think we have Academic premier but I don't really know what else. Perhaps a history database and another on Native Americans? I will be sure to find out when I go to school in the fall, because I want to know what information my students can access!

Photo Credit: Thanks to Flikr users Brandon Doran for his photo Mechanics' Institute Library and Sifter for his photo Library Parabola; both are available through a Creative Commons License.

We're outta here!

Hope everyone has a happy 4th of July. Eric and I are all packed up and leaving town for our river trip on the Smith! We'll follow it up with camping and tunes at the National Folk Festival in Butte. We'll be back online July 12, with only three weeks until our wedding. We'll hit the books hard, eat lots of veggies, and do some yoga in preparation for the big day. See you soon...

Photo Credit: C. Eric Hanson, thanks baby!

CI 553 Reflections - Week 3

Using Indexes and Search Engines & the LM Standards

As I worked through the self-check questions for this week I was amazed to find myself searching (and finding!) information in ways that I had never used before. Sure, I've used a few indexes before like Infotrac and ERIC, but I had no idea the sheer volume of the indexes that were available to me online through the UM library. I found myself scouring the lists just looking at all the indexes available and thinking about how MUCH information that I was able to access. It was funny that when I actually started researching for my SCQs, I used the databases that I was most familiar with. I think there is a level of comfort that we all have with research, and often we tend to go to sources that we are familiar with. That is precisely what I did - I used ERIC and Infotrac almost exclusively in my searches, except when there were explicit directions to do otherwise. Upon reflection, I see that this is exactly what my students do when they research, and why they stick so close to Wikipedia and Google - it is challenging for us to go out of our comfort zone.

Something else I found extremely powerful was the subject searches. Though I knew this was an option, I never explored it prior to the the assignment for this week. It was marvelous to discover how easy it was to find good, relevant information. This it a tool that I will definitely take back to the classroom with me. In fact, I may put together something very similar to the SCQs as an assignment for my own students so they, too, can learn how valuable and easy it is to search indexes using subject titles.

Learning how to search and use indexes, as well as using the Boolean tools, is directly applicable to Library Media standard 2 - "Students will locate sources, use information and present findings." As I consider this, and the Big6 set of skills, it occurs to me that one GIANT research project at the end of the year is not a very good way to teach students how to be good researchers who are information literate. Better would be to teach these skills slowly, throughout the year, using a variety of smaller projects. Perhaps there could be some culmination at the end, though at this point I'm not sure exactly what it will look like. It bears further thought...

Using the library with my students...
A good deal of chapter 6 in the text was devoted to ways of orienting students to their library media centers. I appreciated the idea of scavenger hunts that were designed to help orient students to the library, and like the examples provided. This is something that happens with the freshman during their library orientation in the fall, but it occurs to me that by the time my students are juniors, there are many who have forgotten where and how to research in the library. My juniors, too, would benefit from a reintroduction to the library, especially if I require more research from them over the course of a the year. I will need to speak to our librarian and see if she would be willing to collaborate with me on some sort of reintroduction to the library for my students, though I know that she would be more than willing to do this.


My scavenger hunt would include indexes and subject searches, a review of Boolean terms, and the use of meta-search engines (although I don't tend to like these as well as just using Google). Perhaps my libraria can also suggest some other ideas that would be relevant to juniors.

Engaging ethically with information and technology...
I loved the ideas presented in chapter 7, especially those about note-taking in the digital, where students are taught to copy and paste selectively, highlighting relevant information, as well as taking the citation information. I thought figure 7.2 was especially relevant, and plan to present and use a template similar to this when teaching students to research in the digital era. Of course, this brings up the ever present problem of plagiarism, especially when it is so easy for students to just take other people's work. For this, I find that turnitin.com is quite helpful, and encourages students to do their own work. In the beginning, I frame plagiarism as a learning opportunity rather than a blaming/cheating situation. Once they find out that they can't get away with it, they stop trying to steal other people's words and ideas, plus, they get better at thinking for themselves. It's not as if they are penalized; I simply won't accept work that is not their own.

Until they can turn in their own work, they get a zero; once they give me something they have written, I assess based on the provided rubric.

Interestingly, chapter 8 discusses plagiarism and LPP projects in depth. Figure 8 - 2 is a great graphic representation of 21st century literacy, and I will definitely come back to this one again. (I am actually marking these places in the text so I can find them easily in the fall!) It is important to remember that there are many ways to show literacy. I think that teachers often fall into ruts of doing the same things over and over again. This graphic reminds us to switch it up.

Photo Credits: These images are available through a Creative Commons License. Thanks to Flickr users gaspi*yg for Craning for a Book and docman for Istanbul, Color Illustration. I appreciate the use of their images.