IL

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The Internet is Down: How to Succeed in an Unexpectedly Low Tech Classroom

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Image supplied by the WOC in Tech Flickr

Image supplied by the WOC in Tech Flickr

I recently did a blog post for The Ohio State University Libraries Teaching & Learning blog, giving some tips, and new practices to bake into your habits that can help you when you run into the worst case scenario, flaky internet, your database being “down for unexpected maintenance” right when you are ready to demo, or the internet just plain going out.

Check it out here https://u.osu.edu/tlmaterials/2019/02/08/the-internet-is-down-how-to-succeed-in-an-unexpectedly-low-tech-classroom/

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A Template for Creating Cohesive, Organized IL Instruction Sessions

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A Template for Creating Cohesive, Organized IL Instruction Sessions

Here you can see a template for organizing Information Literacy sessions, perhaps even on a departmental level. This template will allow a librarian to become not just more cohesive and organized but more thoughtful in their instruction sessions, looking at the individual components that make them up, how they are assessing for success, and what frameworks they may be tackling on a regular basis.

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The semester is at a close, and I would love to throw numbers at you...

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But I have only a few that matter right now.

A year and 5 months in a new state, 2 positions held, 54 class sessions in this Fall semester, 50 this past Spring semester, all across 4 campuses, and 1 ACRL Immersion program completed.

While I have physically recuperated from fall, I'm still working on spring, and I still have a firm lingering mental fog. I have interacted with every single new freshman in some way these past two semesters for one side of the house. This is HUGE. More faces know and wave at me, more than I can possibly remember (but I try!).

Now comes the summer, which for me is a second to catch my breath and start to reevaluate how I am teaching. Deja vu right? This happens every summer, time to create new learning objects, Time to really compartmentalize my teaching modules, and of course time to work on some unique course specific projects.

But back to the learning objects, for me it is really time to flesh out and complete a big one this summer for our first years. I want them on a more level playing field with two basic things, keyword searching and web  source evaluation. I am really digging into LibWizard to manipulate it beyond its original means and make it SHINE. I have poked and prodded it and wondered WHY, and then found ways to make it do it regardless. I was fairly disappointed that you could create conditional logic in a quiz, but for some reason not in a tutorial & assessment. I realized I then had to bake a tutorial into a quiz or a quiz into a tutorial, and yet still somehow keep the accessibility and general all around user friendliness of the object, not an easy task. This is worth of an entire post, and one will come later in the summer when my object is closer to completion.

The true test will come once I have this in front of our students and let them loose on it.

 The one thing that makes this mountainous task just feel like a really large hill is that I just completed the Teaching with Technology (TwT) ACRL Immersion. Four great team leads, some of the most thoughtful readings I have ever had assigned... and a huge gap in my education has been filled. I know more terminology to speak about things I have been doing, understand the why's behind many of the things I've been doing anyways, and have more tools to guide my object creation process in a more deliberate manner. I think it has made all my actions when it comes to learning object creation more deliberate, with enduring mental post-it notes keeping statements lingering in my head as I work.

 

 

 

 

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Lets talk desks.

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My previous position gave me a shared office space, shared as in we had the same computer, desk, and chair in what amounted to a large closet with a window ( to the inside of the library, CERTAINLY not to the outdoors) that we could utilize this way only because we worked opposite of each other. As a result, this never felt like MY desk and I disregarded using it as such. Important notes and documents stayed digital. If I needed a print record of something I had a few folders I just kept at the reference desk. ....