TL Under Construction

As I work through the planning phase of my assignment it strikes me that these first steps in the information literacy model could be boring for kids and seem to take up a lot of time. The temptation to just dive in and start looking for stuff would be strong. How can we convince them that planning is worth the effort?  Require them to hand in a mind map or research plan as part of their assignment. It suddenly has importance; it is part of the assignment. As a TL in a collaborative planning effort I think I’d push for this to be included in every single project. Still so much emphasis on product out there!

My second thought was to modify the environment — a very powerful tool that’s often overlooked and something I learned from my children’s kinder teacher many years ago.  In this case, the environment is the format of my pathfinder wiki.  I’ve named the pages to reflect each stage of the information process (although the final ones mightn’t be so relevant to the pathfinder).

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As far as my other subsidiary questions in the planning phase – ‘What are my information literacy needs?” and “What are my information organization needs?” I’ve pretty much got them covered. I’ve been reading though my planned readings and using my Inspiration software again. Inspiration now has Webspiration online in Beta so this makes it easy for student use.

I’ve set up a wiki on Wikispaces. This is the sixth wiki I’ve built. I love the useability of PBWorks but have gone with wikispaces because it has a much cleaner look to it even if it is a bit inflexible. Many of the ‘tricks’ mentioned in the Getting tricky with Wikis article I’d read I had trouble with. I’ve dabbled with html code before but many of the sample shots didn’t match my screen so I’m wondering how long ago it was written. The long/short of it was a classic instance of time-wasting for little gain. Side-tracking on the ‘pretties’ rather than focussing on the plan. (Ahem, doesn’t just happen to the kids).

I’ve also spent a lot of time looking at other peoples Pathfinders. I’ve found most of them to be boring in layout and boring in their writing. Some have not been boring, they’ve been an assault on the eyes and some have been gold nuggets. But like gold, hard to find. Here’s a little article with some tips on design/page layout. There are many more articles on the right side-bar on the site, well worth a read.

I also continue to use my NoodleTools for note-taking and citations. Couldn’t live without it.

Onto Step 3 -Gathering Information