Free Resources for Teachers, Librarians, and Students

Free Resources for Teachers, Librarians, and Students

Last week the White House launched its newest program to ramp up literacy: the Open eBooks App. The app will provide access to thousands of popular and award-winning books to teachers, librarians, and students in Title I schools, special education teachers and students, and military base schools. To sign up for Open eBooks or to acquire the app visit Openebooks.net. For more information about the program, take a look at the official announcement from the White House.

I subscribe to a lot of Education Blogs and I especially like the Edutopia blog. Last week the blog post was all about filmmaking resources in the classroom. I know many of our College of Education students have to create videos and I thought you all might want to pass on these resources to your students. Read the entire blog post, 5 Minute Film Festival: Resources for Filmmaking in the Classroom and sign up for their newsletter at the same time. What education blogs and newsletters do you subscribe to?

Research Tools You Can Use

Recently I discovered several new (at least to me) research tools that can make searching and organizing your articles a lot easier. The first is the Google Scholar extension for Chrome and Firefox. Some of you may already be using it, but for those who aren't, here's a quick (unprofessional) demo of how it works. Pretty slick. It shouldn't take the place of in-depth searching in a database but for basic searching it's great.

Many of you know I have been an advocate for the citation management tool Zotero for years. I hate to say it but I think I have found an even better tool in ReadCube. It has most of the Zotero features I love except the drag and drop reference list creation. But then it has a whole bunch of new features that will make life easier for any researcher. Here's a quick overview of the product.

You can easily import .pdfs including entire libraries from Zotero or Endnote. In fact if you set up a folder, ReadCube will monitor that folder and anything you add to the folder will be automatically added to ReadCube. It will automatically search Google Scholar and PubMed for additional articles by an author or for references. If you read the document within ReadCube you can annotate the article and the annotations can be searched. There is a Word plug in for citation or you can export to Zotero or Endnote, although I'm not sure why that would be easier. Finally, the Pro version ($5/month, $45/yr.) you get unlimited cloud storage, syncing across all platforms/devices, plus advanced citation metrics for an article. Free apps are available for both iOS and Android.

There is one caveat, the program is designed to work with enhanced .pdfs so some of the features may not work on older .pdfs and other formats. But it is a relatively new product, I suspect there will be further enhancements. 

Try it, I think you will like it. And don't forget to tell your doc students about it.

Video's the way YOU want them

Have you ever watched a video from say TED or YouTube and thought - "Wow I could use that in the classroom"? But it's too long or there's really only one small section that you want to use. Plus you would like to add your comments and ask the students questions during the clip. How would you do that?

Well there's WeVideo which lets you create video mash-ups using a variety of media content from the web. It's great for doing professional looking videos but there is a bit of a learning curve. And then there are the commercial products like Camtasia and Capitvate. But they too, take some time to learn and a lot of time to develop.

EDpuzzle on the other hand is a quick and easy to use free web-based application that produces professional looking videos tailored specifically to your curriculum. You can even track your students understanding of the content. Here's a quick overview of how it works.

Pretty simple? Plus there are apps for iOS and Chrome. Imagine taking a clip of a someone teaching and being able to stop, talk, ask a question and get feedback from you students and then go on critiquing. Definitely more engaging.

Gentle Reminders

Since we're a month into the new semester, I want to take the opportunity to remind you about some fantastic resources we have in the library. Don't forget to check out our Alexander Street Press 60 Minutes collection. The collection spans 2 decades and can be streamed directly into your classroom or uploaded to your Moodle class. And if you do use the collection, let me know what you think! We aim to please here at the Atkins Library and user feedback is super important.

I wonder if any of you have heard of Alexander Street Press's Education in Video series? Click on the link for more information about the collection and if you think this resource would be a valuable addition to our collection, please let me know!

Finally, I'd like to beg and plead with you to send me (and Judy) monograph titles you would like added to the collection. I've received book requests from several of you, thank you! I would be thrilled to get book requests from ALL of you. So don't hesitate to send me a wish list of titles you want me to buy. Don't forget to include instructional materials on your wishlist. Our CIMC needs the newest publications to best serve our pre-service and in-service teachers!

ICPSR Summer Program

Many of you already know about the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) If you don't, you need to check out their website because it's one of the best places to find a variety of data associated with education research.

But this post is more for your grad and doc students since it's about the ICPSR Summer Program. The program is recognized throughout the world as a leading program providing basic and advanced training in a wide range of methodologies and techniques for research across the social, behavioral, and medical sciences. The courses emphasize the integration of quantitative methodological strategies with the theoretical and practical concerns that arise in research on substantive issues. Their unique and supportive social environment facilitates professional networking and encourages the exchange of ideas about research theory and practice. 

The program is designed for students, faculty, researchers & policy-makers. Topics include beginning to advanced levels in statistics, data analysis, methodology, research design and more. Courses range from 3 days to 4 weeks and participants will be engaged in hands-on analysis of actual research datasets. All courses are offered on a noncredit basis. However, program can provide official documentation of classroom performance to assist participants in receiving credit at their home institution. The courses are reasonably priced, and fees are lower for those affiliated with an ICPSR member institution and we are a member. For more information go to www.icpsr.umich.edu/sumprog.

From DNA to Beer Exhibit Comes to Atkins!

The Akins Library is hosting a National Library of Medicine exhibit called, From DNA to Beer: Harnessing Nature in Medicine and Industry, from February 8th to March 20th. In addition to the exhibit, we are planning activities such as student and faculty lectures, book displays, a special collections display, a photography exhibit, and hopefully (fingers crossed) a beer tasting event with several local breweries. Literature about the exhibit and complementing activities will be published on our website and on posters and flyers very soon. I encourage you all to consider bringing your students to the library to see the exhibit. You can contact me (amoor164@uncc.edu) for more information or take a look at the exhibit website. 

 
Last year I wrote a brief post about our recently resurrected Popular Reading & DVD collection. The collection, including a New Books section, is located in the library’s atrium near the security offices. Take advantage of the comfortable seating near the shelves and browse our newest and most popular titles. The collection is always changing so stop by regularly to see the newest additions.

New ways to Assess Students

Heading for Tomorrow Land!

Hope everyone had a great winter break. It's hard to believe another semester has begun.

This post is a bit late because I am currently at the Future of Educational Technology Conference (FETC) [formerly the Florida Education Technology Conference] in Orlando. It's a great place to see what teachers are doing with technology in the classroom. I am feeling a bit overloaded from all of the informative and thought provoking sessions.

One of my favorite presenters, Leslie Fisher, talked about two relatively new assessment apps Quizizz and GoFormative.  Quizizz is similar to Kahoot! in that it's an online, multiplayer, timed game, which can be accessed via any device. One major difference is the students can see the question and the answer on their device. The students also see a point total for each question which diminishes as time passes. Leslie had us take a Dr. Seuss quiz to see how it worked. I found it a bit easier than Kahoot since I didn't have to remember the color and/or shape of the answer.

GoFormative is more like a traditional way of assessing students with a few great twists. It's difficult to explain verbally how this app works, so here's a very quick video -

This app appears to be a blank slate for creating a wide variety of assessments, which teachers can easily grade and provide feedback. You aren't limited to multiple choice questions like Quizizz,  Kahoot or Plickers. Students can type responses to open ended question and even draw answers. Hopefully the developers will add the ability to dictate answers. What's really cool is you can actually watch the students as they respond.

I will be discussing other apps and gadgets I learned at about FETC in future posts. I don't want to overwhelm anyone. So take a look at these two promising apps and try them out on your students!