Thursday, December 1, 2011

Information filters lead to knowledge (for some).

I've been seeking a way to explain why I introduce Diigo along with Information fluency skills in the E-Learning for Educators Course. 

This article quickly draws the big picture. Folks seeking to become online teachers are pursuing a specialized teaching skill that requires an information filtering strategy as well as what Rheingold calls "a mental cognitive and social strategy for how you're going to deploy your attention."


Five Forms of Filtering « Innovation Leadership Network | 21st Century Information Fluency

Saturday, November 19, 2011

The Next Generation Digital Book

Many Information Fluency enabled educators have an affinity for the feel of paper and the tactile delight of paging through print books. While I still love the printed form, I'm also engaged by more easy to read interactive work as well. Here's a glimpse into the near future of Digital books, a demonstration of It's Our Choice by Al Gore.
 

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Baloney Detection Kit

The first video from RDF TV! With a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine lays out a "Baloney Detection Kit," ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim

 

Monday, October 31, 2011

Why Kid's Can’t Search


Posted from Diigo. The rest of E-Learning for Educators group favorite links are here.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Can We Teach Creative and Critical Thinking?


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Zero to Eight: Children's Media Use In America

    • Zero to Eight is a nationally representative survey of parents of U.S. children ages zero to eight, conducted to understand the patterns of media use among young American children. Covering TV, other video, reading, music, computers, video games, and mobile digital devices, we examine time spent and frequency of use; differences in children’s media use by gender, race, or socio-economic status; the home media environment; educational media use; and access to the newest mobile media platforms like smart phones and tablets.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Participatory Librarianship Starter Kit

    • Simply put participatory librarianship recasts library and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created through conversation. Libraries are in the knowledge business, therefore libraries are in the conversation business. Participatory librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation. Be it in practice, policies, programs and/or tools, participatory librarians seek to enrich, capture, store and disseminate the conversations of their communities. Explore the information below, and throughout this site to learn more.
    • The starter kit is a resource to move participatory librarianship from concept to reality. How does a focus on knowledge creation over artifacts look in practice? How can librarians be prepared for a world of participation? The answers to these questions and more come more from experimentation than theory. The Starter Kit is the ever increasing forum to detail, document, and solicit real steps in implementing participatory librarianship.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Free E-Book: School Libraries: What's Now, What's Next, What's Yet to Come

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Online Teacher's Information Fluency Toolkit

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Information Investigator Preview




Limited time offer:  Preview this course. Cost? Your time and attention. http://21cif.com/selfguided.html

Friday, September 23, 2011

Search Stories: Zack Matere: Growing Knowledge

Search Story: Using the Internet to find information that changes lives. Zack Matere uses a village bulletin board to tack up vital knowledge he gets from the net. Real change, now.

Search Stories: Letter from Descartes

Erik-Jan, a philosophy scholar in the Netherlands, has spent 20 years studying René Descartes. In 2010, his search to understand Descartes' correspondences led him to something that had been missing for over 300 years


.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Is your district spending 8 - 16k per year on you?



Education Week: Bringing Professional Development Into the 21st Century
  • But the body of research reveals that staff-development costs, including central-office and local staff, hours of teacher time, stipends, salary increases, substitutes, facilities, instructors, and material expenditures hover in the range of $8,000 to $16,000 per teacher, per year, especially in larger districts. Most districts have no idea they spend that much on staff development. Sadly though, most administrators agree their professional-development outlay has no correlation with student-achievement results.

    • The only effective way to scale professional development is to leverage online learning. Online professional development can deliver dozens of hours to teachers within eight weeks and includes collaborative learning environments supported effectively by coaching, modeling, mentoring, observation, and feedback. Online professional development works because it reduces travel costs and coordination, minimizes time out of the classroom, and allows educators to learn at their own pace. In fact, research suggests that online learning happens faster than face-to-face learning, with increased retention of the material.
    • Online professional development engages educators in high-quality learning by adhering to best practices in adult learning. It promotes differentiated coursework while enabling teachers to engage collaboratively with colleagues who share their learning needs. By delivering effective, differentiated online professional development, districts leverage the powerful advantages of technology and the online-learning environment. Districts delivering online professional development realize cost savings, scale critical instructional practices, differentiate teacher learning, advance strategic human-capital management, maintain intentional fidelity, and transform teaching.
    • The $10,000-per-teacher cost could be justified if a significant change in teacher practice or student achievement were the result. But most professional development today lacks alignment to student-achievement needs, fidelity of implementation, and scale or reach. Professional-development days are historically spread throughout the year and delivered by internal resources through one-day trainings with little or no follow-up. In most cases, the inch-deep and train-the-trainer approaches to professional development won’t transform practice.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of E-Learning for Educators group favorite links are here.

Competition for Library Jobs Heats Up


"You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians."
~~ Monty Python ~~



Special thanks to Librarian David Wee of Harvard-Westlake Middle School for the initial quotation that triggered this post. 


Now I realize why he's going ape during the first week of school!


~ Dennis

Smart Search for Parents and Kids






Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

JoyceValenza - See Sally Research

So much more to learn, so much more to teach. The evolution of the librarian and the library.




Joyce Kasman Valenza loves her work as the librarian at Springfield Township High School (PA)! For ten years, she was the techlife@school columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joyce is the author of Power Tools, Power Research Tools and Power Tools Recharged for ALA Editions. (PowerTools Remixed is currently in progress.) Joyce is a Milken Educator, an American Memory Fellow, and a member of the Library of Congress Teacher with Primary Sources cohort. Her Virtual Library won the IASL School Library Web Page of the Year Award for 2001. She has won her state's PSLA Outstanding Program (2005) and Outstanding Contributor (2009) Awards. Joyce is active in ALA, AASL, YALSA, and ISTE and contributes to VOYA, Technology and Learning, LMC and School Library Journal. Joyce speaks internationally about issues relating to libraries and thoughtful use of educational technology. She considers herself a mother and founder of the school library Geek Tribe, SchoolLibraryWebsites, New Tools Workshop, TLNing, TL Virtual Café, TL Ning, Pathfinder Swap, School Library Websites, and TLGuide.

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Information Fluency Common Core Alignment


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Twitter, Research, Historical Tweeting

Twitter, Research, Historical Tweeting
  • Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research  Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold – over a day, a week, a month or more – reflecting the event’s actual duration."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

21Cif Diigo Feed 09/06/2011 (a.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

E-Learning for Special Populations


Posted from Diigo. The rest of E-Learning for Educators group favorite links are here.

Curious about curation?

Howard Rheingold interviews Robin Good on curation




More resources:


Joyce Valenza: Web 3.0: We have so much stuff!

Buffy Hamilton: Summer Seed Ideas: Curation, Participation, and Student PLEs



Aggregating the Information Flow to Feed your Needs

Another term or filter for understanding the information flow is calling all this the Semantic Web.


Search, Research, and Referencing


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

High Tech / Low Tech Strategies

  • Might help create a blended classroom, even when you have to share the blender.  Common sense advise for the real world of underequipped classrooms and stretched thin teachers.
    • How can we best use limited resources to support learning and familiarize students with technology?
    • get creative with lesson structure
    • Take advantage of any time that your students have access to a computer lab with multiple computers.
    • Relieve yourself from the pressure of knowing all the ins and outs of every tool. Instead, empower your students by challenging them to become experts who teach one another (and you!) how to use new programs.
    • Small groups of students engage in dialogue on a particular topic, then a member uses a digital tool to report on the group's consensus.
    • Students assist one another in creating digital products that represent or reflect their new learning. It’s a great way to spread technological skills in a one-computer classroom.
    • Group Consensus Method
    • "Pass it On" Buddy Method
    • Rotating Scribe Method
    • Each day, one student uses technology to record the lesson for other students.
    • Whole Class Method
    • Teachers in one-computer classrooms often invite large groups of students to gather around the computer. Here are a few suggestions for making the most of these activities
    • When we are faced with limited resources, it is tempting to throw up our hands and say, "I just don't have what I need to do this!" However, do not underestimate your ability to make it work.
    • He leads off the book with a discussion of the effect of Google’s “personalization” feature on the ranking of search results. This feature uses 54 signals (what browser version you’re using, your prior searches, geographic location, and so on) to customize search results for each user.
    • “increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”
    • Bottom line: Holy moley, Google does filter the news. You really need to go beyond the first few search results if you want to get a relatively well-rounded view of the news.
    • While it is fairly common knowledge, at least among info pros, that Google search results vary widely from one searcher to another, I had assumed that I would see far less variation in Google News searching.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Mobile Learning

    • Because of the proliferation of new technologies, the younger generation today is outgrowing traditional forms of education – remember pencils, chalkboards, textbooks and graphing calculators? Whether we are in the car, on the train, at work, or in a classroom, mobile technology in particular is giving us the ability to learn on-the-go. See the infographic below to learn why we are wired for mobile learning, and how we can use mobile technologies to educate ourselves.


    Via: Voxy Blog

Thursday, September 1, 2011

common core & 21st century skills

  • As a promoter of information fluency, I'd argue that it is a 21st century foundation skill for all core academic subjects.

    To be information fluent  means a student can independently research and evaluate digital information relevant to any topic, the common core academic subjects, as well as media studies and consumer issues.


    There's no disconnect! What do you think?

    • Common Core has been critical of the idea that our children’s education should be organized around a set of so-called “21st century skills” instead of core academic subjects such as history, science, and the arts.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Information Investigator: 3.1 Self-Paced Online Training

Boost Information Fluency Scores 50% in 3 hours.

This is our newest approach to information fluency assessment and training.

This package starts with a 10-level interactive tutorial that diagnoses and strengthens eight key search and evaluation competencies.

Live search challenges are coupled with "first aid kits" that address the knowledge and skills needed to succeed.

A Certification Exam is provided after the tutorials to assess information fluencies in finding and evaluating information.

The entire experience can be completed in about 3 hours.

If you are interested in previewing the entire package for your students, please contact Carl at carl@21cif.com.  

The course is completely free.  You are under no obligation to purchase anything.

This course and assessment package was developed with feedback from teachers and library media specialists last spring. Over 900 students in middle school and high school used the materials this summer and improved their information fluency scores by over 50%.

We will give you full access to the course so you can evaluate the effectiveness of the training.  If you wish to make the course available to your institution, group discounts based on volume are available.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Flow of Information

Join our Information Fluency Group


    • Information flows in different ways in different subject areas. Each of the
      links below takes you to a timeline which will show you how information flowed
      from a sample event, research study, or artistic creation. Pick the subject
      area that you are researching or that you find interesting.

    • The nitty gritty on finding things in an electronic format

      You've been told that the computer is a vast treasure trove of information
      at your fingertips. But when you try to get into that stash, you're often
      left with a great deal of information that is mostly useless.

      This unit cracks open the information vault to give you a look inside
      the database, which is the structure that contains the information you're
      looking for.
    • Information Literacy is the ability to identify what information is needed, understand how
      the information is organized, identify the best sources of information for a given need, locate those sources, evaluate
      the sources critically, and share that information. It is the knowledge of commonly used research techniques.
    • Putting the research process to work

      Don’t know where to begin? This unit will help kickstart your research
      with a ten-step strategy that works for just about any discipline.

      In the first part of this unit you’ll find instructions on a ten
      step research method. On the last pages of the unit, you’ll see
      the strategy put to work in 3 examples.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

What is Web 2.0? Learn it in 5 minutes or less

  • Video site dedicated to short instructional tutorials for the technology classroom.  
    • At Learn it in 5, you'll learn what is Web 2.0, and strategies for using Web 2.0 technology in the digital classroom - all in 5 minutes or less.

      Learn it in 5 is a powerful library of how-to videos, produced by technology teachers, for the purpose of helping teachers and students create classroom strategies for today's 21st century's digital classroom. These step-by-step how-to videos walk teachers through Web 2.0 technology, demonstrating how to use Web 2.0 applications like blogs, social networks, podcasts, interactive videos, wikis, slide sharing and much more.



Monday, August 1, 2011

Common Core Standards for Librarians

ISTE 2011: Put On Your ‘Big Girl Panties’


ISTE 2011: Put On Your ‘Big Girl Panties’ (School Library Journal)

This is a call to arms By Kathy Ishizuka. Many Library Media Specialist attended the ISTE conference in Philadelphia this summer. 


The "gorilla-in-the-room issue of threatened obsolescence" is what it's all about.  Read this insightful 3 step program for standing up for ourselves!


Tags: research 2.0, Information fluency, information literacy, 21cif


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

The Social Media Arms Race

Stop the Social Media Arms Race in School | What's the PONT
  • Good summary of how educators viewing the use of social media tools in schools as a battle are not likely to win and an opportunity will be lost.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of E-Learning for Educators group favorite links are here.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Information Fluency Games / Information Literacy Games!










    • No Password required.
    • Games created by Dr. Carl Heine, Director of the 21CIF Project.
    • These resources are published free in the games section of our site.
    • Sign up for our free newsletter to stay posted on our latest games.

    Sunday, July 24, 2011

    Mobile Tech in Libraries

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

    Monday, July 11, 2011

    Sweet Search For Kids

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

    Sunday, June 26, 2011

    First Aid Kit: Quick Tutorials

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of Info Fluency group favorite links are here.

    Wednesday, May 25, 2011

    Teaching Information Literacy with Primary Sources (UW-Stout Graduate Online Course)

    EDUC 744 951 Teaching Information Literacy with Primary Sources 
    Completely Online: 3 Graduate Units from the University of Wisconsin Stout!

    Learn how to locate authentic digital primary sources in multiple formats to enhance your curriculum. Develop age appropriate learning activities that promote higher level questioning and critical thinking skills while adding excitement to student learning through engaging activities.

    The course is especially helpful for teachers of AP classes, teachers addressing state and national standards requiring the use of primary sources, and teachers working with National History Day activities. Materials from TPS Direct, the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources professional development program, will be incorporated in the class.
      
    Last Call! EDUC 744 951 3 graduate credits June 13 - August 12, 2011

    Course Info     Registration

    This course is taught by noted Library Media Specialist:

    Mary Alice Anderson

    School of Education
    University of Wisconsin-Stout
    140E Voc Rehab Bldg
    Menomonie, WI 54751
    Phone: (507) 452 1180 after 4:00 p.m. CST
    E-Mail: andersonmary@uwstout.edu

    Wednesday, March 30, 2011

    Online Teacher Toolkit: Information Fluency Learning Games and Resources

    Drop these resources into your library website or online course!



    Information Fluency Teacher Resource Kits
    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.