Group items tagged

"Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today's librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond. Click here to find out more! Librarianship is an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons solve their problems and, in the process, learning new things. Librarians may also go on shopping sprees, deciding which books and online resources to buy. They may even get to put on performances, like children's puppet shows, and run other programs, like book discussion groups for elders. On top of it all, librarians' work environment is usually pleasant and the work hours reasonable, although you may have to work nights and/or weekends The job market for special librarians (see below) is good but is sluggish for public and school librarians. Nevertheless, persistent sleuthing-that key attribute of librarians-should enable good candidates to prevail. That effort to land a job will be well worth it if you're well suited to the profession: love the idea of helping people dig up information, are committed to being objective-helping people gain multiple perspectives on issues-and will remain inspired by the awareness that librarians are among our society's most empowering people."

Campus Bird is a free site designed to help students locate a college that fits their needs and wants. The site offers all of the usual selection criterion like major, location, campus size that you find on most college search sites. The differentiating aspect of Campus Bird is that they have embedded a Google Maps view of all of the colleges in their index. Once you have selected your search criteria you can quickly view the location of each college and explore the surrounding area. In some cases you will be taken to a virtual tour of a college's campus. Campus Bird says that it is working on adding more virtual tours to their database.

"Reconsider the Use of the SAMR Model December 4, 2017 - Leave a comment The four-stage Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) model introduced by Rueben Puentedura back in mid-2000 has not only grown in popularity there are people building upon this its unsubstantiated foundation. The SAMR model was initially intended to help K-12 teachers move the up the ladder of technology use by using tech for the creation of new tasks, tech for a significant redesign, tech as a direct substitute with functional improvement, and tech as a direct substitute, with no functional change. SAMR not only looks like an innocuous model of using technology it also seems to appeal to the way many people tend to approach the use of technology. If we look closely at the fundamental presupposition of its use then we will see that there are serious issues in how the model can enhance learning. The first time I was introduced to the SAMR model was over a decade ago and I recall thinking that this model has a fundamental flaw that many people will tend to overlook. While using technology to simply make an activity or task more efficient or to explore ways to enhance or even redefine that activity or task may seem innocuous or even worthwhile the problem that we run into with this sort of thinking is that we are ignoring the validity of the original task that SAMR is being applied to. For example if you use SAMR to move your paper-based fill in the black worksheet to a digital model (substitution) and then add some branching questions in a google form (augmentation) and then add enabled voice responses (modification) and finally allow your class to create a video to answer the questions (redefinition) the problem is you are still asking your students to regurgitate content regardless how sophisticated the regurgitation becomes. I have also noticed in my time working with hundreds of teachers and faculty that there is a tendency for most people to NOT move beyond t

PDFBinder is a free tool that allows you to merge multiple PDF documents into one. Simply click "add file" select the PDF documents you want to merge, and then click "Bind". That's it. This is a great resource for schools and teachers that use PDF documents often. Sometimes you have different files, whether scans of paper documents, PDFs of websites or already created PDFs, that you want as one file.

"More fun ideas to transform students into skilled researchers"

Grade online assignments in a single step! Get reporting & analysis on student performance! Email students their scores! Designed by a teacher, for other teachers!