The Unquiet Librarian

Pew Internet: Search Engine Use

The Pew Internet and American Life project has just published a new study that reports 49% of Internet users employ the use of a search engine use on a typical day.  The report also found that younger users are more likely to use search engines regularly than older Internet users.  What accounts for this jump in search engine use from the 2005 study?  The authors surmise that increased access to broadband Internet connections, improved search engine performance on individual websites, and the improved quality of general search engines are the three major factors for the increase in search engine use.

What implications does this study have for us as librarians and educators?  More than ever, we need to take the time to show students tips and strategies for effective searching of major search engines; in addition, we need to expose students to alternate search engines that may better fit their searching needs.  As we continue to teach our students about website evaluation strategies, we should also make our students aware that search engines yield paid and unpaid results—many users may not realize how this factor can “color” the results they get from a particular search engine. 

You may also be interested a more detailed study of Internet use conducted by the Pew foundation in 2005—although it is three years old, the findings are more detailed than the 2008 study and reveal some interesting data about Internet usage.

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Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

Multigenre Research Projects Summer 2008, Buffy Hamilton via kwout

It is a work in progress, and it will have to be moved in a few weeks as our district moves from FrontPage to Sharepoint (boo hoo!), but here is my current resource page on teaching the multigenre paper.

http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/buffyhamilton/multigenre_research_projects_summer2008.htm

Here you will find:

• My handouts in PDF format
• Blog reflections from the students
• Sample papers written by real high school students
• My favorite resources on teaching and learning with multigenre papers

While I have dabbled with this project with short stories, this is the first full scale effort I have completed with a general research topic.  I would like to do a full scale project of this nature with a novel next year…it is just hard sometimes with my night school pumpkins, especially with the EOCT course, because of the time factor.  However, I am really pleased with my efforts this summer, and I already have ideas on what I will do again, and what I will do to make this project even better!

I need a few days to clear my mind, rest, and reflect before I write my final blog post about this research experience.  However, I can say that I highly recommend it!  I will be writing more soon on what I feel that my students and I learned from this research experience.

We are officially five days into our multigenre research paper, and overall, I am really pleased with how my summer school “peeps” are coming along with their work!  On Friday, my students actually asked if they could have extra library time because several were really engaged in their work!  As one student said, “I am on a roll, and I don’t want to stop!”  Thankfully, another class had cancelled, so I was able to buy us another hour. 

The most difficult days were “Day 1 and Day 2″ on Monday and Tuesday—these were the days they were finding information sources and citing those sources in NoodleTools.  Because we were all over the map in our topics and pre-existing skills on how to use NoodleTools/NoodleBib, it was rather frenetic as I helped 20 students.  The students were very patient, though, and I greatly respected how they persevered in finding meaningful information.

As I floated around and helped students during our 2.5 hour library time on Friday, it was gratifying to see the students really “into” their work and realizing the multigenre paper is not as hard or difficult as some first thought.   They will do final reflections next week, but here are their thoughts on their progress and findings on Day 3:  http://project800s.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/10b-multigenre-research-reflections-mini-essay-june-18-2008/ .  Please note while all students composed their reflections in writing, not all have had a chance to post to the blog at this time.

A few observations from my experiences through the “teacher” lens this week…

• Having access to books with a more recent copyright date and accessible reading level are extremely important.  Although I have not mandated a book resource due to the extreme diversity of our topics(three database resources are required) for this project, many sought out books or were extremely receptive to my suggestion they try a book (hooray!).   Many teachers assume kids do not want books, but many still do, and we as librarians need to keep buying books that will speak to our students.  So much great nonfiction is available…we need to encourage our students and teachers to remember the value of this resource.
• While we definitely want to encourage our students to tap into the great information in databases, we also should continue to encourage them to look for QUALITY web resources–in some cases, better information has actually come from websites although most students have found the database articles (reference and periodicals) to be their best sources.
• The majority of students have been quite positive about NoodleBib;  although most had not used the electronic notecard feature before, the students have been really positive about this feature!
• Having a media specialist who knows the collection and how to cite all kinds of sources correctly in NoodleTools is essential, particularly if you are dealing with a larger class and students who need support and scaffolding.
• While allowing students to choose their own topic has made it a little more work for me to support the diverse range of research interests, the kids have been much more engaged and positive.  To see kids focused and engaged in research, especially in the middle of the summer, is a joy! 
• The biggest two obstacles I have faced on this campus are:
  A.  student work for the most part is not mapping to the normal home directory.  As a result, work is getting saved in all kinds of strange places on local hard drives.  We have discovered saving work to a flash drive, using the same workstation (not always feasible), or emailing work (I recommend gmail) have become “musts.”B.  The ability to download photos or to right click for copy and paste is practically non-existent—the students cannot right click on ANYTHING.  I understand restricting the ability to right click for .exe files, but for pictures files?  This obstacle has been a tremendous thorn in our side!  At my home school, Creekview, students have had the ability (at least, they did as of the end of May), to download photos or to copy and paste text.

I will re-upload the link to the actual research assignment on Monday as I just realized it seems to be down this evening.   While I have done research papers and projects with my night school students in recent years, students were given a menu of topics to choose from; this is the first time I have given students carte blanche and let them choose something meaningful to them.  As I stated earlier, it has been a little more work on my end to do this, but I am so glad now that I did.  I cannot wait to see the final products that we will complete on Wednesday! 

p.s.  the student who complained last week about how this project would make him think…well, it has, and he is now my student who is most positive about the project!  He has had nothing except good things to say the last few days about the project and how much he is enjoying it! 

As most of you know, not only am I a high school librarian by day, but I also still teach 10th and 11th English courses by night for our district evening school during the regular academic school year.  I should probably take more time to write about my observations on students’ information literacy skills and perceptions about research (and perhaps I will during 2008-09), but as many of you can relate, it is hard to find time to stop, reflect, and then actually blog about what is happening “out there” because time seemingly just gets way so quickly.

Today marks the beginning of Week 2 of our three week summer school session.  While many express shock and skepticism about the feasibility of trying to do a 90 day course in 15 days, we do meet four and a half hours per course—the economy of time forces both teachers and students to focus on what really matters! 

On Friday, we began our multigenre research project in my afternoon 10B Literature/Composition course.  This type of research paper can incorporate traditional elements of the “written” research paper (and mine does), but it also calls upon students to interpret and represent key learnings and findings of their research in creative and alternate genres.  For more information, see my links at http://del.icio.us/creekview_hs_library/multigenre .

At first, most students seemed a bit dazed and confused.  What is multigenre?  What are learning artifacts?  You want me to do what?  Present information I’ve learned in an alternative way?  Think?  Huh?  Many vocalized these questions, and for those who didn’t….I only had to look at their faces to read their thoughts!  After we had reviewed the assignment, though, and the students had an opportunity to look at real projects/papers and examples, several began getting excited and were already brainstorming ideas.  My 10A students probably have a slight advantage because we are incorporating a few multigenre elements into our short story project and our Georgia Peach Book project.  I am hopeful the little gurgles and spurts of enthusiasm I saw in some of my students Friday afternoon will become a full blown “gush” this week as we essentially spend about two and half hours in the library each day this week.

One young man looked dismayed and sad during our class break after we had reviewed the assignment and discussed the project.  When I asked him what was wrong, he cried, “I can write a paper no problem and give you the facts, but interpret the information….that is going to be hard!”  I asked him what seemed difficult or challenging about the multigenre artifacts because in my mind, those are the creative and exciting parts of the project. 

With dismay he sputtered, “Because I will have to think and really show what I have learned“!

With a wry smile on my face, I replied, “That is exactly the purpose of this research!”

I thought his response was very telling about what our “NCLB” generation kids are used to doing in the classroom and what they have been trained to do:  regurgitate information and move on.  No synthesis, no analysis, no evaluation of information—just “learn” it and “cover it” for a test.  Of course, we as librarians have seen how the emphasis on standardized testing has killed inquiry and research in our media centers, so his comments were not really surprising.  However, they are troublesome just the same.

I will be interested to see how he and the rest of his classmates evaluate this project in about eight days from now.  In the past, I have done this project as a literature based project, and while students at first looked like deer in the headlights, nearly all became excited and engaged in what they were doing; projects pulling in multigenre elements have gotten high marks from my students in the last two years, but this is the first time I have made the entire research project a multigenre paper.  They are doing topics all over the map, and I honestly can’t wait to see what they do with this….stay tuned!