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).

——

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

McKenzie (1999, section 2) describes the planning phase as the time to consider –

The best way to find pertinent and reliable information that will help to construct answers to subsidiary questions.

My thoughts on the best ways to obtain information for my first subsidiary question – “what are my information needs?”

As I worked through the VELS standards and the written assignment pages from the History teacher I can certainly see why collaborative planning would be a far more desirable arrangement than this making up of an electronic pathfinder from an already planned unit/assignment. I’ve had to guess at some of the purposes, combing through the VELS to see what matches. I’ve also had to think about how to dovetail the info literacy skills into the flow of the assignment. The only mention of Information Literacy is a reference to the school planner/diary for notes regarding the layout of bibliographies and footnotes! This part of the curriculum is still be under-valued and under-addressed.

While ideally I would seek to work with the teacher, this is in fact an assignment from the local secondary school and I don’t work there. It is term break as well so no hope of interviewing the teacher. =) I decided to tackle the secondary school assignment after having done my first CRT work in a highschool library this year. I had a bit of experience with the information needs of the students doing this assignment as they came to the library.

I’ve also worked through some of the pages of the IMPACT documentation tool and like the organization of it but see some inflexibilities too -  mostly that it’s designed for American school use. Eg. dates can only be entered in American-style (mm/dd/yy) and the subject drop-down box doesn’t have some of the subject options offered in Australian schools and you can’t leave it blank etc.

My second subsidiary question is — “What are their information needs?”  “Where do I find the best resources to meet the students’ needs?”

They need:

• resources that shows different perspectives of the event
• resources that explain general background information/key terms and concepts
• statistics

I’ll be looking in:

• HS library OPAC
• HS library databases
• Trusted educational portals
• the Internet!

____________

Herring, J. E. (2004).  The internet and information skills. London: Facet.

Loertscher, D. V. (2000). Information literacy. In Taxonomies of the school library media program (2nd ed., pp. 157-182). Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research & Publishing.

McKenzie, J. (1999). The research cycle. FNO: The Educational Technology Journal, 9(4). Retrieved from http://questioning.org/rcycle.html

The essential question (or primary question as Loertscher describes it) was harder to formulate than I thought. I thought I knew what I was doing but came up with –

1. Which are the best resources for the electronic pathfinder for the Grade 9 History class and teacher?
2. How do I decide what are the best resources for the electronic pathfinder?
3. Which are the best ways to cover my own assignment requirements for the electronic pathfinder?
4. What are the best resource for the essential questions that Year 9 students will have to come up with in order to meet their assignment?

In the end I decided it was a case of wearing three hats as I work through this assignment in order to do it well.

The map was to explore the ‘dimensions of the essential question” (1999, section 4). It was helpful in clarifying my thoughts about what areas I’d need to cover both as the TL creating this pathfinder and as the TL student. Some areas I’d mapped out are out of the scope of the assignment but I included them in the map anyways. Besides as McKenzie states:

Because students are actively revising and rethinking their research questions and plans throughout the process, they are forced to cycle back repeatedly through the stages … so that the more skill they develop the less linear the process. (1999, section 3)

Yep, sounds like I’ll be revisiting the mind map more than once and perhaps going in circles? Productively speaking of course! It’s really true what they say about ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ when you start something new.

Recapping the Research Cycle here –

1. Questioning/wondering
2. Planning
3. Gathering
4. Sorting/sifting
5. Synthesising
6. Evaluating
7. Reporting* (after several cycles of the process bring me to INSIGHT)

I realised as I mapped that I’d like to brush up on my knowledge of Information Literacy in relation to VELS standards and just refresh my understanding of it generally. Does it actually involve more than I’ve mapped out?  I guess I’ve arrived at the Planning Stage of the cycle.

I’ll include the map here — still adding to it as I go but it’s certainly helping me to think about the shape this Pathfinder wiki will take.

_______

McKenzie, J. (1999). The research cycle. FNO: The Educational Technology Journal, 9(4). Retrieved from http://questioning.org/rcycle.html

I am in the process of unpacking the second assessment item for ETL501: the assignment has two parts –

1. Creating an Electronic Pathfinder and
2. a critical analysis of the process in which I was engaged in creating the pathfinder.

Our pathfinders must follow a specific sequence:

• Introduction – audience/purpose/information literacy skills
• keywords and definitions
• reference sources – print/digital
• printed resources
• online resources including search engines

So this is all pretty straight forward. It’s the second part that needs a bit more reflection. The critical analysis also has a required structure:

• curricular context of topic/learning needs of specified group
• critical analysis of search strategy employed/use of tools/sources/evaluation of tools
• critical analysis of pathfinder in relation to students’ IL skills
• reflection on learning within the process

I am always looking for opportunities to apply some of the  models, tools, processes recommended by the library gurus such as David Loertscher, Jamie McKenzie etc. I thought I’d employ a research model I’m adopting for the pathfinder to my own work in order to understand it’s use ‘from the inside out. I’ve used the Big Six in the past with groups of students and would like to find out more about Jamie McKenzie’s Research Cycle. It has an emphasis on questioning that appeals to my own teaching philosophy so I’ll incorporate it in the pathfinder and apply it as my own re/search strategy.

I also came across an interesting organizational tool that I’d like to experiment with for the second part of my assignment with modification. The IMPACT (Instructional Media Professional’s Academic Collaboration Tool) planning and implementation documentation tool was designed by INTEConsulting Inc. and comes as a software package that converts all your input data into charts and reports. It looks like it will produce the kinds of documentation that many principals like to see and would certainly strengthen any TLs profile. I haven’t sent for the package yet but will record information using a modified format to begin with.

It feels better knowing I have some kind of ‘bones’ to hang this assignment on. I hope it actually fits and that I”m not being over-ambitious. Don’t want to lose sight of the actual assignment in the lure of the chance to try some new ‘toys’.

_________

Flickr image: “Getting to the bottom of it” by Tom Poes

ETL 501 is bubbling along – maybe at the 3/4 mark but will definitely need some editing as I’ve blown out the word count on the second part of the assignment.

But in the real world of  this TL and her school library there is even more exciting news! The fence has gone up around the old multi-purpose room which means the renovations are about to begin. Our school opted to have the BER grant put into the building of a new multi-purpose room and the capital works grant applied to the old multi-purpose room to make-over into the library.  I haven’t seen the final plans for the renovation yet — something that’s got me a little curious — and a little nervous, I’ll admit.

Here are the before photos. I’ll try to keep a record running here of the journey.

Study Search explains itself as:

[using] the power of Google’s search engine combined with a growing database of educational websites. When a search is done, Google checks our database and gives those sites priority in the search results. The student is still doing a full Google search but the results are tuned to display sites that are more relevant.

The ‘About ‘ page goes on to explain that sites within their database are compiled from suggestions by teachers, Teacher-Librarians and site volunteers. As a student of ETL 501 currently studying educational website criteria and evaluation of websites, I was interested to know if the suggestions sent in were evaluated in any way. The FAQs mention only that –  “sites are selected on their content and ease of navigation”. I clicked on the website suggestion form link to see if there was anything that might enlighten me further — there was not.

Other features include  a choice between primary and secondary school searches and the site defaults to Google’s Safesearch mode of searching (although this may make little difference to many schools with their own filters).

In all the searches I perform/supervise with students at school, this search engine returns the highest number of relevant, readable sites and is in the familiar Google format.  Yes, yes they should get to know the many advantages of the others and I encourage them to experiment but as far as reducing the frustration factor goes, this one wins hands down so far.

Ask Jeeves was an old favourite of mine. I used to recommend it to the kids in primary school because it coped with them typing  in a whole question. It picks out the keywords and searches for them. But it used to be pretty limited in its relevant results and very American-oriented so we dropped off using it.

It’s now called Ask Kids and has ‘grown up’ some since I used it last.

The home page is really kid friendly and clean (no advertising at all). Once in a search there are sponsored websites but no advertising. I tested both natural language (What endangered animals are there in Australia?) and keyword (volcano causes) searches.

Once you’ve hit the search button, the next screen offers you some broader and narrower search term options in a side bar(the Australian animals search options were not Australian however) and then the search results in the main body of the page.  There was much more success with the volcano search than the Australian animal question – it still appears to be heavily slanted to American audiences. The first 5 hits I did get for Australian endangered species were:

• kidcyber.com.au
• Kids’ Planet – to be searched by continent – ‘grey wolves’ were incorrectly listed under the Australian continent! and the fact sheets for most of the animals were general not Australian specific. (Info quality – poor).
• a dead link to a public library homework page
• Perth Zoo with some species listed in their conservation program

So overall a disappointing result. But Boolean searching using keywords ‘endangered animals OR species’  brought up different and better results.

I had much better luck with volcanoes. First 5 hits included:

• learner.org
• ThinkQuest
• Cascades Volcano Observatory
• Volcano Live (website of John Search scientist and volcano adventurer)
• Staffordshire Learning Net Web Enquiry (webquest)

Ask Kids also offers options to search ‘images’ and ‘video’. Again the first question had poor results, the volcano search results were much better.

One feature I really missed on this site was knowing the total number of hits for a search. It always helps me to gauge if the student is searching too broadly or narrowly.

Ask Kids has other areas including one called ‘The Schoolhouse” which features databases by subject area. I searched here too and found useful information for both topics.

Overall, this search engine performs best  if keyword searching and Boolean search strategies are used. It seems to be well pitched for middle primary to lower secondary or for ESL students. Subjects still need to be fairly general in order to get decent search results.