Tales from a Loud Librarian

Early this past week, one of our science teachers, who was suffering with a terrible case of laryngitis, talked to me about a presentation that she was suppose to make to the faculty at a local Catholic school on Monday, the 19th. She initially agreed because she thought that she was just talking to the science department about preparing students for the engineering and science fair, but then they asked her to talk to the whole faculty about the research process. She knew that I would be a better fit than she would for that. Also, she really did not have a voice to be able to speak to an entire faculty. With her help, I was able to put together this presentation in two days. That is a record for me because I always agonize over how to organize the information and what exactly needs to be included. When you go through the slides, you will find that I have inserted live links on the slides with screenshots, so you can see the actual resources that I created for the students. I hav...

View image | gettyimages.com View image | gettyimages.com As I was getting ready to plan for the teaching of the research process to our 6th grade students, I remembered that I had changed my game plan last year. Since my brain has been aging, it is harder for me to know what I did last week much less how I taught something last year. I did remember that I had written a detailed account of what I did with this lesson on this blog. So I conducted a search to find the post, and you can read about it here . By reading my blog entry from last year, I saw that we had deconstructed the research process to start with the bibliography. The teachers and I decided to get that out of the way first. Before the day of the lesson, I reviewed my slide show that you can see below. I did some editing and took out tasks that I thought weren't necessary and added some slides at the end to be more specific about explaining how to create a word document out of the bibliography...

The middle school English language arts' teachers and I have been really working on developing our method for teaching the research process over the last few years. When the sixth graders arrive at Patrick Taylor, we know that they have not had a lot of experience writing research papers. They may have written a report in fifth grade but not much more, and I am hoping with the Common Core standards that this will change over time. For now, the students need to be taken step by step through the process with the teachers and myself holding their hands.  Using the ISBN on the book to create the citation in Easybib As I reflected over the steps that we took last year to teach the process, I decided to change my tack and begin with the bibliography. Our school pays for each student to have an Easybib account. We thought that by starting with the bibliography, we would be breaking down the process to the smallest bits and make it easier for the students to handle. The 6th gr...

Easybib and ALA joined forces to create this infographic illustrating where students get most of their information when creating citations. Note the sites students seem to use the most -- sites that are user-generated. Librarians can help steer students to accurate and reliable resources. 

I took a survey with Easybib a few weeks ago about information literacy and what it means for the students at my school. Easybib is what the students at Patrick Taylor use to create citations for research papers. All the answers to the survey were compiled into this cool infographic that gives you a picture of how students are manipulating information and what librarians are trying to do to help them.  Click here to read what Easybib has to say

I like to post weekly, but all I have is a very short note. I saw a small group of 7th graders today. The assignment is a mini-research paper to correlate with their reading of the novel,  Flush  by Carl Hiaasen. I put together a set of 7 task cards for them to use to begin their research for this assignment. They were given specific resources both print and electronic to use to find information on water quality and water pollution. Once they found their sources of information, the students had to create a citation for each source in Easybib . I thought this would be simple for them. All of the students had experience with the databases and using Easybib. It did not go as well as I would have liked. First, the students did not follow the steps on the task cards. Not following directions is often a big problem with students. So I went back to my task cards and at a teacher's suggestion, I divided each task into steps. You can find my task cards here .