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


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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.