Thing 10: Search Tools Ninja

Thing 10: Search Tools Ninja

Welp, I made it to the finish line & my final module for this iteration of the Cool Tools for Schools Course. I have enjoyed my stay and have found all of the exercises to be the optimal amount of challenge for me as I made the transition from elementary school librarian to middle school librarian. This course has been a bright spot in my year. At school, I often found myself thinking about, talking about, and recommending things that I learned within the modules.

So, I sank my teeth into this lesson and all of the memories of the early Internet and a world before Google came flooding back. I even had a few memories about getting my Masters degree in Information Studies at SU and learning about extremely vague & extensive paid databases that could be queried for just about anything ever published in any field. Just learning how to conduct a search using these tools was a mini-master’s degree in itself!

I am very intrigued by Duck, Duck, Go. My crazy prediction for the next iteration of the Internet (outside of the rise of digital money) is the focus on user privacy. As, I was using Duck, Duck Go, all I could think about was how I recently began using the Brave web browser in an attempt to take back control over my own privacy. My sense is, the Cambridge Analytica Facebook information leak from a few years ago, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to internet companies collecting user data. When you agree to the Terms of Use when downloading an app, you are pretty much waiving all of your rights to your information remaining private. In a world where our privacy and ability to lead quiet lives seems to be disappearing, the natural response, to me, will be for the pendulum to swing the opposite direction towards decentralization & increased protection of personal data. Web Tools like Duck, Duck, Go are just the beginning of what’s to come.

Next, I headed over to LibGuides and got completely immersed in checking out created guides from many, many other libraries. The guides were intriguing and are stuck in my head as a way to pass along pre-created curations & resources to my colleagues. I saw resources and guides for everything from college law to black history being taught in middle school. I really like LibGuides.

For the assignment portion of the module, I tackled 2 separate tasks. The first thing that I attempted met an immediate need for a unit that I plan on co-teaching with a 6th grade teacher on the topic of Social Justice. I have been aggregating and collecting resources and stashing them using Google Drive. But, I feel they might look better and be more usable if I use Pinterest to curate them. I kept thinking that a LibGuide would be the ultimate way to complete this task but realize that it’s a pay service...which is preventing me from tackling that task. I started curating the resources on this board: https://www.pinterest.com/ashworth0339/social-justice-unit/

The second task that I chose to was to complete some of the self paced Google Power Searching classes. I found the classes to begin VERY, VERY basic and slow…..almost to the point of being boring so I skipped ahead a bit to Unit’s 4 & 5 where they start to dive into credibility, checking facts and verifying information. I am going to borrow a lot of the concepts and videos when I go to teach web literacy concepts to 6th & 7th graders in the beginning of the school year. The videos posed some interesting search queries and scenarios. I think that I could cobble together a few neat handouts that have the kids complete the same search tasks as in the Google videos and then use the videos as a resource & reinforcement to the concepts being taught. There’s some really good stuff in these self paced lessons….again, particularly unit’s 4-6.