Teaching RPC

Monday and Tuesday of this week was spent teaching the research process calculator and with the leftover time I also went into proper format for creating a bibliography for interested students. Both were very rewarding lessons. Students really appreciated the calculator and appreciated it's value for other classes. Most of them either book marked my page or Elm for future reference. COOL!!!

IB Music

Hey, just realized that no one knows to look at my IB Music page. That is the focus class for this research and information literacy work. Check out the rest but click on IB Music to see the latest improvements. Duh, just realized I can link that page, here it is. http://henry.mpls.k12.mn.us/IB_Music2.html

Updated Web Page

After viewing the Research Process Calculator I got so excited I updated my web page with a link to the calculator and will show my students Monday where to find it and how to use it. I am also linking my web page here and hopefully my peers will view it and give me feedback and suggestions for improving it.

http://henry.mpls.k12.mn.us/Ms_Roth.html

The frustrating part about our web pages is that no one ever looks at them. Last year I had a survey asking viewers to let me know each time they visited and I got 5 responses, all first time users and they never came back.

Question: How do you get your students to use your web site? Why spend so much time on something that no one looks at?

Reading through Thing 5 has given me some ideas for promoting my web page, possibilities include putting assignments on the page rather than printing them and handing them out in class, including more resources and references materials guaged to excite and stimulate thinking, give extra credit points if they locate certain items and report a "key phrase" or something like that. Amazing the power of extra credit points!

Research Process Calculator

Tonight we set up our RSS and learned about the Research Calculator. It was very interesting and I can hardly wait to try it out with my students. They always seem to be a day late and a dollar short. Now with another "entity" imposing objective deadlines for them (rather than my seemingly subjective ones designed to ruin their social life) maybe I'll see more work from them and maybe they'll be able to visualize and continue along a sensible timeline rather than a last minute scramble to do the work. We can always hope can't we?

Mpls Library Card

I went online to see if my card still worked. It had expired, so I called the help desk and they reactivated my card. I have now have access from any computer. I also have now done the other assignment for class and I am ready for Wednesday. Hope the food is as good as Monday.

Training Day One

Day one training and we all survived. Learned many new things about things I never heard about on the internet and about information literacy. It's all exciting and interesting but it's getting to be a long day.