Lesson 10

My biggest discovery

I have two; favorite one first: We had one 6^th grade core doing animal reports to compare and contrast two animals. Oozing pride, I showed them the World Book Kids’ World of Animals link to bring up a chart on their animal (after showing it to the teacher to be sure this wouldn’t run roughshod over her research goals for the classes.) The specifics listed aligned beautifully with their assignment, even though neither the teacher nor I knew about the chart when she made her assignment. One student noticed that at the bottom of the left column you could click “Compare Animals” and list a second animal. This brings up the option to list a second animal and compare specifics side-by-side on the same screen. Wow! Their research was done for them, and they could proceed to taking notes and writing their papers. I had shown them World Book in part because of the MLA citations at the bottom of each article. We discovered that to see the citations we had to go back to the original articles, but the students were so motivated by having the comparison charts right in front of them that they had no problem going back to the individual articles to copy the citations. For me, there is no better student learning experience than when they can teach me! This was a win-win-win, and there is now a 6^th grade girl in Rapid City who is thinking – correctly – that she could be a pretty good school librarian!

My second great discovery is the HeritageQuest local history books. I got bit by the family history bug 30 years ago when I was living in Virginia, thinking I was the descendant of 19^th Century potato-famine immigrants, and accidentally discovered I had ancestors who settled Virginia in the late 1600s. For more than two decades, I have been looking for a great-great-great grandmother who has no last name of her own, only her married name. HeritageQuest has a variety of local histories and genealogies for the counties in which this woman lived. Her marriage record lists the names of her witnesses including one Brenda Moseley, who I think is her sister. Lo and behold, HeritageQuest has a genealogy of the Moseley family in Bedford County, Virginia. And I can bring up each page right in my kitchen, and dig in while dinner is baking in the oven. How great is that?!

As to promotion, I still like the idea of a floor-to-ceiling list of what’s at different resource sites. I’ll be working on that this summer. But the main promotion I do is to teach students the sites in front of their teachers. The students don’t yet understand how valuable it is to have reliable information, but more and more of their teachers do. I emphasize the same six or eight sites for a variety of projects. My goal is to have students automatically going to SDSL sites when they get a research assignment by the time we send them up to high school. This is working pretty well, in part because the number of Google hits for any given topic is now astronomical. And, through their use of social media, students are beginning to realize how much inaccurate information is available online.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to dive back into all these great resources. Even (no, especially) when I got stuck, as I did with CAMIO, I am helped by remembering how it feels to search when you don’t know how to get what you want, or even if what you want exists in the resource. The Challenge reacquaints me with the frustration and confusion my students feel as new researchers. That’s important.

When I teach the SDSL resources in front of our middle school classroom teachers, they are ecstatic that our students have access to so many reliable, vetted sources of information, and that the resources cover all reading levels and all topics. From our perspective as educators of South Dakota’s children, this is absolutely the best way to spend SDSL’s limited funding. I have only been a middle school librarian for four years, but even in this small slice of time, many teachers who come to the library for a research presentation are now requiring only SDSL sites. They are telling their students not to waste their time sorting through six million hits on Google or checking the reference notes on Wikipedia to figure out what is reliable. This is not the case with teachers who conduct research in their own rooms. Slowly, with the availability of the SDSL online resources, we are raising the level, the expectation, and the rigor expected of South Dakota students one teacher at a time. You are providing the resource that makes that possible. Thank you so much!