Just the Facts, Ma’am

I’ve been working on designing the “Dear Someone/Persuasive Letter” assignment to use this fall, and stumbled upon this great site from Annenberg called Fact Checked. There are a ton of great lesson plan ideas that incorporate information literacy skills.
Here’s what the site has to say about itself:
“Our aim is to help students learn to [...]

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7 Things You Should Know About

I’m sure many of you have already seen this, but just in case you haven’t…Educause has put together a series of technology reports under the theme “7 Things You Should Know About.” For 2008, there are PDF’s available for the following technologies: Wii. 2nd Life, Ning, Google Apps., Flickr, Multi-touch Interfaces, and Lulu. [...]

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Thing #2: Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

The second step in the All Together Now: A 2.0 Learning Experience is RSS feeds. Here’s the Common Craft video for RSS in Plain English:

Thing #2 of the program takes you through a discovery exercise of:

Defining and learning about the basics of RSS through readings, video, and tutorials.
Exploring two RSS readers, [...]

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Opposing Views

http://www.opposingviews.com/
This is not to be confused with Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center, but the concept is very similar. Here’s an excerpt from their FAQ that explains the concept:

How does an Opposing Views debate work?
Each debate starts with Opposing Views picking a central question on people’s minds. We then invite interested experts, opinion leaders and advocates [...]

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Thing #1: Blogs

Today is the first step in the School of Library Journal’s “All Together Now: A 2.0 Learning Experience”, starting with the topic of blogs. Now being a blogger already, I am quite familiar with the blogging basics, but there were still a few interesting bits in the first step.
First, with a little reminder from a [...]

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All Together Now: A 2.0 Learning Experience – July 21st

I mentioned the Learning 2.0 self paced program in one of my earlier posts. I caught a post on Tame the Web, one of my favorite Web 2.0/Library 2.0 blogs, announcing that the School Library Journal is starting a Learning 2.0 program called, “All Together Now: A 2.0 Learning Experience.” This is going to be [...]

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Since I Laid My Burden Down

In collaboration with Jazz-rock Foundations professor, Chuck Mancuso, I have had success in using the Anthology of American Folk Music in my Lib100 class. While students were learning about the roots of rock and roll in MUS206, they were each assigned a musician (some students were assigned folklore related topics or a specific genre [...]

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Dear Someone,

My friend and colleague, Elizabeth Kelley, gave me the idea for this assignment (which she uses in her Foundations of Inquiry course). Students are assigned to write a “letter to the editor” on an issue of their choice (the “editor” can be any person they choose…the President, the Mayor, Danny Wegman, etc.) However, [...]

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Shattered Glass

I’m attaching the lesson plan and handouts for a lesson on plagiarism/ethics of information (adapted from Carol Anne Germaine.) The lesson uses the DVD “Shattered Glass”, which is about the reporter Stephen Glass, who was caught fabricating stories for The New Republic. It’s a great way to talk about the ethics of digital information [...]

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The Healthy Skeptic

One idea that I’ve been playing around with is using “The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting through the Hype about Your Health” by health journalist Robert J. Davis as the basis for an assignment on cynicism, skepticism, bias, and evaluation of resources. Davis does an incredible job of researching current health claims (dairy, green tea, supplements, diets). [...]

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