More Tutorials for Graduate Students

Last week I taught a graduate student workshop for some physical science and sports science graduate students.  After updating a PE for Grad Students site, I created a Jing tutorial, explaining what changes I had made that may be helpful for them.  Unfortunately, it exceeded my goal of less than three minutes (it is 3:47 long).

On that site is a link to a tutorial a graduate student in the College of Education's Instructional Design program helped me create using Camtasia.  This tutorial is the first I have created using this powerful software.  Honestly, I only recorded the tutorial, and the graduate student edited the content.  Last week I uploaded it to TeacherTube with the title: Research Success for Graduate Students. Again, this tutorial is a bit lengthy.  It seems that students prefer short, brief tutorials, so who know how many will even look at it.  Hopefully, the conscientious graduate students will watch and benefit from viewing it.

Are screencasts worth doing?  Have you benefited from viewing screencasts?  Do you create screencasts yourself?  Please share what you do and why.

I still need to read the article "Do Screencasts Really Work?"  If you have read this article, please comment on it.  Do you agree?

Embedded Librarian: Working in the Course Management System

For the first time, I am working as an embedded librarian this semester. I met the class on the second day they met. I have given them instruction in the Library. Now I am offering assistance with research by monitoring a discussion forum with their course management system (CMS). (We use Moodle.) My first post alerted them to recent multimedia tutorials I had created, as well as some older ones. In checking the forum today, no student had asked me any questions about research or asked for help, so I decided to offer a quick search tip, which appears below; this post.

Students tend to wait until the last few days before an assignment is due, before they really begin their research and writing. When this happens they do not have time to ask for assistance, or they might be embarrassed. Sometimes librarians have gone home for the day or the reference desk has closed already by the time they think to ask for help. Perhaps some of these tutorials and tips can be useful for them, since they can be accessed at any time. As long as they think to look at some of these resources, it could be useful for them.

Like other CMS software programs, Moodle allows the instructor to send a mass email to everyone in the class. Perhaps I should take advantage of this function to alert students to the resources they have available to them. Who know? Maybe they will be appreciative of a reminder to conduct their research and actually get an earlier start on it.

Do you have time-tested techniques for reaching students at their point of need? What do you do?

Tip: Did you know you could expand your results with an asterisk or a question mark? This can be helpful if you need more results.

For example, if I were searching for information on prescription drug abuse, I could "truncate" each word to get more results. Ex: prescri* and drug* and abus*. This tells the database to search for variations of the different words: prescribing, prescribe(s), prescription, drug(s), druggie, abuse(s), abusing, abusive, etc. When your search returns many results, this strategy is not recommended, but when you are getting too few results, then it may be helpful.

Note: the asterisk (*) is the truncation code used in the majority of databases (Ebscohost, LexisNexis, ProQuest, etc.). The question mark (?) serves as the truncation code in the Library catalog. Therefore, pigment? would return records with the following words: pigment(s), pigmented, pigmentation, pigmenting, etc. Truncating back to "pig*" would not be so helpful, since it would return results about "pigs" the animal, about humans acting like pigs, about guinea pigs, about skin pigments, etc. in addition to painting with pigments, etc.

Google Documents: Creating Quizzes

Teachers need to seek feedback in order to understand whether or not students are understanding the material. Isn't this one of the reasons why we give tests and quizzes? If we are interested in student learning, we need to know what students know and fill in the gaps where possible. Google Documents allows individuals to create online quizzes that they can then share with people. Others can collaborate on the quiz and view the results.

The results can be viewed in spreadsheet format or in graphs. Take a look at this
YouTube video on how to create quizzes and view results in graph format. Apparently, you can embed the quiz inside of your blog, so I'm giving that a try. Hopefully it works and you fill out the quiz. I do appreciate feedback. Information-literacy professionals should be seeking feedback from students. This is just one possible option.



If you are interested in creating a Google Docs quiz that you can share, just login to Google Docs and select the "New" button in the upper, left-hand corner of the task bar. Select "Form." You can create open-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, questions with check boxes, choosing from a list, and a scale. Give it a try.

Follow-up for MC 399

After yesterday's class with the Mass Communications students, I reflected and felt that I should have shown the US Statistical Abstract rather than LexisNexis Statistical, and I should have shown LexisNexis Academic and pointed them to the News tab. I think they would have been able to find more relevant information for their assignment that way.

Also, after looking at Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) I am initially inclined to say this would be a good tool for the students who are searching for trends. It provides graphs of searches individuals have conducted over time. It also shows which countries and cities have conducted the most searches on the words entered.

Thinking of relevant words for your search can be critical to finding the necessary information. In yesterday's class I don't think it ever occurred to me to use the word "trends" when helping a student try to answer the question: "How to 18-24 year olds use email today?" This may or may not be helpful; however, a search in Academic Search Complete yielded 109 results. Granted, once I limited the search to articles published in the last four years only 29 results appeared--Yet, this is indicative that email usage and popularity has waned substantially in the last four years.