Mark wrote: >I wonder what opportunity for librarians to work with the
teachers, in secondary schools, to help identify appropriate resources
and integrate the IL in the coursework? Does any coursework in school
actually reward information literacy?

The opportunity for the librarian to be involved in identifying
resources and integrating IL depends very much on the individual schools
or even individual teachers, and to some extent on the pushiness of the
librarian! Most school librarians would love to be more involved but are
not given the opportunity. I have offered to run 'pre-coursework'
sessions on research strategies, bibliographic citation etc, host
lessons for research, buy in books, source websites etc, but get very
little take up on it. Other schools seem to involve their librarians
much more. As for coursework rewarding IL, there are a couple of marks
for the bibliography but as far as I am aware, that's it.

Lesley

Mrs Lesley Martin MA MCLIP
Librarian
PSHCE Co-ordinator
Culford School
Culford
Suffolk
IP28 6TX
 
Tel: +44 (0) 1284 728615 Ext 312
www.culford.co.uk
 
School Library Association Board Member 2008-2011
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Information literacy and information skills teaching discussion
list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
[log in to unmask]
Sent: 01 July 2009 14:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [LIS-INFOLITERACY] On-line databases for Information
Literacy in schools

Hi,

It will be interesting to see what answers people come up with. 

The problem seems to be the level of the material you get back. The
majority of freely available databases that I am familiar with would
tend to retrieve articles that are too complex/academic.

My first thoughts were about databases, such as, ELDIS (for info about
developing country issues - maybe good for geographers, sociology);
Biomed (for science); Pubmed (for science, health, medical) or portals,
such as, Intute (which indexes general Web resources) - but the tendency
is to get back stuff that's too high level. 

However, I can't believe there aren't other databases that are free and
appropriate out there.

Another idea would be to expose them to different, free, search engines,
such as, Quintura, Kartoo, Exalead, Scirus etc. and get them to compare
the results, the functionality, the bias etc.. Plus people could compare
advanced and simple interfaces.

Newspaper sites, and their searchable databases, do give some experience
of more complex searching or at least could lead to relatively good
material that is not too complex (O/A/IB level), such as, the financial
times or the guardian. Plus there are slightly more specialist sites,
but still relatively accessible, that can be used to develop search
skills and expose students to more quality information, such as the New
Scientist.

The key, of course, is to show the learners that they can get better
resources, impress the teachers, and better marks by extending their
knowledge beyond Google and the text books.

I wonder what opportunity for librarians to work with the teachers, in
secondary schools, to help identify appropriate resources and integrate
the IL in the coursework? Does any coursework in school actually reward
information literacy?

Best wishes,

Mark