Blog #5 – Information Literacy

After completing the MAPping information activity, what are your reactions to your findings? What will you do differently while searching on the Internet for information now? How confident are you with the information you've used in the past (as part of your college career and/or in your profession)?

I was only moderately savvy on the Information Literacy Quiz. It’s been a while since I used Whois, but I should probably start using it more often. Usually the only sites I visit that aren’t my usual haunts are new shopping sites that have something I was looking for. I should start to use Whois so I can keep from getting scammed. I think most of the information I’ve used in the past has been good because I usually use the district’s online databases when looking for information.

What are some implications for the future of our students if we fail to teach them these skills in school? After all, the schools may block access to sites, but students still have access at home.

Students (and teachers) could be terribly mis-informed or led astray. I need to do a workshop with all the teachers ASAP. I have some teachers who still do Google image searches even after I told them to use http://yahooligans.com/! Hopefully they will all be more aware when they see the Information Literacy Quiz site.

Do you see any advantages for organizing your information via Delicious? What else did you find when exploring the other bookmarking applications? What are some ways you think you could use tools like these in the future?

I originally signed up for Delicious to set up a baby registry so I could list things from multiple sources. It’s a great way to store bookmarks online. I could have a set of bookmarks for every class that comes to the library based on the class’s favorite authors and types of books. I could also create a Web Quest and have a list of links for the Web Quest right in Delicious so that the students don’t wander around the internet.

Blinklist takes a snapshot of the website on that date. This would be good for saving news articles and any sites that change often.

Diigo lets you create student accounts for a whole class. Just click “Educator”. It looks like Diigo will let you highlight certain information and add sticky notes to a webpage.

Del.icio.us is good for organizing bookmarks, but I wish it would remove links for items that no longer exist. The bookmark took me to the store just to find a page saying the item was no-longer available.

Stumble Upon is going to have to wait until summer. It looks like it was made for bored people who have time to aimlessly look at sites for just about everything they’re interested in. I’ll see if I can check it out this summer.

Toobla seems like the perfect thing for a pack-rat. You can save a ton of videos and other things, but not take up any additional space. This would be good for if I created video instructions for various tech troubleshooting and then teachers could access the videos as needed.