Libraries & the Open Education Movement
(View Complete Item Description)This video discusses the various ways in which academic libraries and their librarians are supporting the Open Education Movement.
Material Type: Lecture
All resources in Alex Test Group
Teaching Strategies for Information Literacy
(View Complete Item Description)This is a chart of instructional teaching strategies for use by librarians teaching information literacy. It is aligned with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for use in higher education classrooms. The examples include flipped, online, and in-person lesson ideas.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Instruction and Pedagogy for Youth in Public Libraries
(View Complete Item Description)There seems to be little resistance to the idea that children and teens learn in public library spaces. However, many public librarians do not see themselves as teachers. This implies that much of the learning that happens in public libraries is incidental—tangential to the “real” purpose and design of these spaces and programs. In this book, we make the case that public librarians should embrace an explicit instructional role as a core part of their professional practice. Inside, you’ll find both a comprehensive review of what is known so far about instruction for youth in public libraries and a primer on core educational concepts and frameworks for current and future public librarians. Each chapter includes real-world examples of libraries and librarians who are already practicing powerful teaching. We hope that this text will inspire a new group of students, practitioners, and researchers to expand on our ideas, create innovative forms of teaching and learning that are unique to public libraries, and engage all children and teens in powerful and meaningful learning experiences.
Material Type: Textbook
ELM Learning Center
(View Complete Item Description)The ELM Learning Center is a collection of instructional materials on the Electronic Library for Minnesota (ELM) databases organized into courses. These materials are created by librarians in the Reference Outreach and Instruction unit of Minitex. The ELM Learning Center can help you get to know ELM and provides as much information as you'd like on using ELM more effectively.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Game, Homework/Assignment, Interactive, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Self-talk During Inquiry: Helping novice researchers productively shape metacognition
(View Complete Item Description)Experienced researchers “get” inquiry - that is, they have an ongoing internalized self-talk process that evaluates, draws connections, and creates next steps for the information-gathering process. But, they may not know that or how they do it.Along with the steps of inquiry, we need to help learners understand the metacognitive "self-talk" that guides their decisions which drive the inquiry. What researchers think is more important than what they do. So how can we help researchers recognize and utilize their metacognitive processes that guide their research? In order to prepare information-age learners, librarians need tools to teach the thinking that lies behind the inquiry.In this module, librarian candidates will learn to make the internalized reflective process overt. Candidates will create metacognitive awareness of the reflection process that accompanies inquiry. They will demonstrate understanding by creating concrete reflection scaffolding tool for emerging researchers.The skills and understandings gained from this module will help school librarians build instruction in support of CCSS.ELA-Literacy. CCRA.R.7, 9, 10.
Material Type: Module
Vetting OER for Cultural Relevance, Accessibility and Licensing
(View Complete Item Description)Finding and selecting OER to adopt at your college can raise questions about both the quality and accessibility of the content for your students. Join us for this webinar to hear about best practices and rubrics developed to ensure that OER content meets instructional material standards, accessibility guidelines, and open licensing policies established at your institution. These rubrics assist faculty, librarians, instructional designers and other staff to select and adapt open educational resources that meet student needs regardless of disability but are also culturally relevant and engaging for students at your institution and can be freely re-used, re-mixed, and re-distributed.
Material Type: Lecture
Build a Birdhouse
(View Complete Item Description)Students construct bird nests and birdhouses. They research birds of their choosing and then design houses that meet the birds' specific needs. It works well to conduct this activity in conjunction with a grades 9-12 woodshop class by partnering the older students with the younger students (but it is not required to do this in order to conduct the activity).
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Solar Cookers
(View Complete Item Description)In this project students will research and then build a basic solar cooker shell made out of cardboard. Then they will run a variety of materials through experiments. Data from the experiments will be used to determine which materials should be added to the solar cooker shell to improve its ability to heat up food. This project was created as a collaboration between a science and an engineering/woodshop class. The engineering class researched and build the basic solar cooker cardboard shells. The science class tested additional materials to add to the shells to improve the solar cookers. Then the engineering class, following the directions from reports created by the science class, added the materials to the solar cooker shells to create the final products.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Reading, Unit of Study
Arctic Animal Robot
(View Complete Item Description)Students create four-legged walking robots and measure how far they travel across different types of surfaces. They design and create "shoes" to add to the robots' feet and observe the effect of their modifications on the net distance traveled across the various surface types. This activity illustrates how the specialized locomotive features of different species help them to survive or thrive in their habitat environments. The activity is best as an enrichment tool that follows a lesson that introduces the concept of biological adaptation to students.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Don't Bump into Me!
(View Complete Item Description)Students' understanding of how robotic ultrasonic sensors work is reinforced in a design challenge involving LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT robots and ultrasonic sensors. Student groups program their robots to move freely without bumping into obstacles (toy LEGO people). They practice and learn programming skills and logic design in parallel. They see how robots take input from ultrasonic sensors and use it to make decisions to move, resulting in behavior similar to the human sense of sight but through the use of sound sensors, more like echolocation. Students design-test-redesign-retest to achieve successful programs. A PowerPoint® presentation and pre/post quizzes are provided.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Action-Reaction! Rocket
(View Complete Item Description)Students construct rockets from balloons propelled along a guide string. They use this model to learn about Newton's three laws of motion, examining the effect of different forces on the motion of the rocket.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Motion in 2D
(View Complete Item Description)Try the new "Ladybug Motion 2D" simulation for the latest updated version. Learn about position, velocity, and acceleration vectors. Move the ball with the mouse or let the simulation move the ball in four types of motion (2 types of linear, simple harmonic, circle).
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
Introducing Design Thinking into Your Library
(View Complete Item Description)This resource is arranged to give teachers and librarians websites and strategies to integrate “design thinking” into instruction and libraries.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
Adding Helpful Carrier Devices to Crutches
(View Complete Item Description)People using crutches have their hands occupied, which makes it difficult to carry books and other items they want to have handy. Student teams are challenged to design assistive devices that modify crutches to help people carry things such as books and school supplies. Given a list of constraints, including a device weight limit and minimum load capacity, groups brainstorm ideas and then make detailed plans for their best solutions. They create prototypes and then test for functionality by loading them and using them, making improvements with each iteration. At a concluding design expo, teams present their concepts and demonstrate their final prototype devices.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Android App Development
(View Complete Item Description)Students develop an app for an Android device that utilizes its built-in internal sensors, specifically the accelerometer. The goal of this activity is to teach programming design and skills using MIT's App Inventor software (free to download from the Internet) as the vehicle for learning. The activity should be exciting for students who are interested in applying what they learn to writing other applications for Android devices. Students learn the steps of the engineering design process as they identify the problem, develop solutions, select and implement a possible solution, test the solution and redesign, as needed, to accomplish the design requirements.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Audio Engineers: Sound Weavers
(View Complete Item Description)In this lesson, students are introduced to audio engineers. They discover in what type of an environment audio engineers work and exactly what they do on a day-to-day basis. Students come to realize that audio engineers help produce their favorite music and movies.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Backyard Weather Station
(View Complete Item Description)Students use their senses to describe what the weather is doing and predict what it might do next. After gaining a basic understanding of weather patterns, students act as state park engineers and design/build "backyard weather stations" to gather data to make actual weather forecasts.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Bees: The Invaluable Master Pollinators
(View Complete Item Description)The study of biomimicry and sustainable design promises great benefits in design applications, offering cost-effective, resourceful, non-polluting avenues for new enterprise. An important final caveat for students to understand is that once copied, species are not expendable. Biomimicry is intended to help people by identifying natural functions from which to pattern human-driven services. Biomimicry was never intended to replace species. Ecosystems remain in critical need of ongoing protection and biodiversity must be preserved for the overall health of the planet. This activity addresses the negative ramifications of species decline. For example, pollinators such as bees are a vital work force in agriculture. They perform an irreplaceable task in ensuring the harvest of most fruit and vegetable crops. In the face of the unexplained colony collapse disorder, we are only now beginning to understand how invaluable these insects are in keeping food costs down and even making the existence of these foods possible for humans.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Biodomes
(View Complete Item Description)Students explore the biosphere's environments and ecosystems, learning along the way about the plants, animals, resources and natural cycles of our planet. Over the course of lessons 2-6, students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems - exploring energy and nutrient flows, basic needs of plants and animals, and decomposers. Students learn about food chains and food webs. They are introduced to the roles of the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles. They test the effects of photosynthesis and transpiration. Students are introduced to animal classifications and interactions, including carnivore, herbivore, omnivore, predator and prey. They learn about biomimicry and how engineers often imitate nature in the design of new products. As everyday applications are interwoven into the lessons, students consider why a solid understanding of one's environment and the interdependence within ecosystems can inform the choices we make and the way we engineer our communities.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Blast Off
(View Complete Item Description)Rockets need a lot of thrust to get into space. In this lesson, students learn how rocket thrust is generated with propellant. The two types of propellants are discussed and relation to their use on rockets is investigated. Students learn why engineers need to know the different properties of propellants.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan