Friday, October 26, 2012

Week 4 Hobbies & Crafts

     So excited about this one, as I am a crafter. I work in stained glass and make cards.
My first search in stained glass was not a huge success. Not sure what I was thinking I'd find. Many hits for stained glass "looking" things like clay, fabric and even paper. For real glass hits, there were mostly hits referring to what we call hot glass, or fired in the kiln. I have done some of this, but not a lot. Narrowed my search to stained glass panels and started seeing better results. Many pdfs from the same couple of books, but still nothing from the standard glass magazines. (Stained Glass Patterns Quarterly, Stained Glass Quarterly or Art Glass World).
     If patrons are looking for instruction at a basic level the craft books are fine, or you could steer them to your local craft school. :) For the advanced glass crafter, the results aren't so helpful, reflecting the antique market and historical more than the crafter.
     I then turned my search to paper crafting. Here I hit the motherload! Wow. I think I will stay here for awhile.........phew! I'm back. I chose a patchwork card from Cardmaker magazine. It looks pretty straight forward with template and directions. Perhaps I'll post a picture if I can get to it this weekend.
The help section has the tutorial (which we just watched), advanced searching techniques, and most importantly, how to set up RSS feeds so the articles of interest come directly to you. Pretty neat, huh?!

Week 3 Newspapers


  At our high school we use Maine Newstand quite a bit with the students. Mostly, they like to look up articles about sports they participate in. 
    We recently closed an elementary school in Wales.  I was surprised to see that the Tribune Business News from Washington followed the story.
I also searched for news about our high school. Found lots of sports and a little budget information. (not so surprising) 

As I was going back through the months, I realized that this could be a way for students to create a timeline, following an important story from beginning to end, perhaps even talking about the impact of media on perception.
Sorry this post was late. I tried three times to start and kept getting interrupted. (geesh!) I saved, but couldn't find my drafts, until today. :)
On to week 4!

Friday, October 12, 2012

Week 2 Britannica

Week 2: Brittanica

     I chose to examine the High School level of Britannia School Edition this week. For my country, I chose Bolivia, as my daughter is finishing her graduate program in Cochabamba and I am always looking for new information.  Although limited in ebook resources, there was plenty of other general background information available through all of the other content links.
     Multimedia offered maps, pictures and videos. The best resources were listed under Web's Best Sites. This had travel links (Lonely Planet),  governmental links (CIA The World fact book), and news links (BBC), although the most current article was over a year old.  There would be plenty of material for high schoolers to begin their exploration of a country and pick up keywords and important facts on which to use for further research.
     Over and above the offerings from Britannica itself, there are links through EBSCO to relevant journal articles.  This is probably the best part of the site. Students would be able to gain background knowledge from the homesite and begin looking for relevant articles as well.
     The FAQ section  and the Help sections were a bit helpful, but the Visual Tour would be the best tool for first timers. The Teacher's resources were too young for the high school crowd (grades 3 & up), but could, with some work, be expanded to fit our level. Perhaps the Academic level would have better research resources for high schoolers.  
     Using Workspace is a great tool, as long as you are staying only on Britannica. You can easily set up a "space" to save articles and media. There is a spot to add notes next to each saved item and a tool bar which would be helpful if you need to export or print information.
     Each article has a citation at the end which can be saved in one of many formats. The Learning Materials are not linked to the subject searches, which would be really cool.
     Britannica High School may be a starting point for freshmen. It remains to be seen if Academic might not be a better fit, since our kids are so savvy at MARVEL.





Tuesday, October 2, 2012

So here we are. It's awfully quiet out there. You are expecting to read something profound here? Perhaps tomorrow.