St George Library Blog/Podcast » Internet sources

Library role in information literacy recognised and rewarded

ssummersmorrow — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:11:54 +0000

For a number of years St George College Library has been fortunate enough to have a room in the library that the college had given to the lbirary for excusive use as a literacy room. This has meant that when teachers bring students in for literacy classes library staff have been able to give detailed instruction in literacy theory. The weakness has always been that to practice the theory students have had to move to a computer room within the library – this computer room can be difficult for library staff to use as teachers can prebook it class use. A further weakness with this set up is that all theory (up to one hour) must be given in one hit and then all hands on practice done in one go – not good teaching practice.
For several years library staff at St George have put together a proposal to obtain funds from the Institute to allow for the literacy room to be fitted out with computers. This year we were successful!!!! The library literacy room fit out is now complete and boast 16 computers, custom built desks, ergonomic chairs, a ceiling short throw projector, speakers and the capability to run VHS and DVD to the projector.
For the library staff this means that even if a teacher books a literacy session last minute they are guaranteed to have a room ready to go as the room can’t be booked by anyone else at the college. It means for students that they won’t need to listen to one hour of theory first – they can learn one aspect of literacy and practice it, listen to and learn the next section and practice it, etc.
Library staff at St George College wish to acknowledge the wonderful support of the College Management Team in recognising the important role that library staff play in increasing information literacy skills of students and in the need to library staff to always have a room at their disposal to run the many and varied information literacy sessions that they provide.
If library staff are not using the room and the library computer room is booked, teachers can also take classes into the literacy room.

Learning for Sustainability

greig.thomson — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:07:24 +0000

Want to know what you can do at home, work and play to protect the environment, conserve energy and save money? Then check out the amazing It’s a Living Thing website.

The library also has several specialised databases on the environment to help you with your studies: GreenFILE, Sustainability Reference Centre, Environment Complete and Environmental Studies and Policy Collection. You can log on at our website under Information databases then OneSearch.

Join Heart Foundation Walking groups today

jason.wang — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 02:07:40 +0000

“Good Health” magazine, May/2010 issue is now available in the library. There is an interesting article “Heart disease – your 10 page guide to a healthy heart.” by Lisa Offord from page 89 to page 98. Statistics show that heart related disease is the leading cause of deaths in Australia. This accounted for 34 percent of all deaths in 2006, almost killing one Australian every 10 minutes. This article helps you to understand your heart, the cause of disease and how to prevent it happening. Also on page 100, there is a Heart Foundation ad. sponsored by the Australian Government encouraging people to join walking groups for both health and social benefits. I hope everyone reads this article and benefits from it.

To find more details about joining a walking group please visit the following website: http://www.heartfoundation.org.au/sites/walking/Pages/default.aspx

Edublogs.TV

gail.simmons — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:01:01 +0000

Twitter in plain English http-edublogs http-edublogsEdublogs.TV is available from the Teachers’ Resource page on Sydnet at http://www.sit.nsw.edu.au/library/ . Here is an item about Twitter from Edublogs. http://www.edublogs.tv/play.php?vid=1229. What do you think of this?

The Semantic web … the next best thing!

patricia.murdoch — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:35:54 +0000

The semantic web is variously described as an extension of and/or the future of the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee (and others) published an article in Scientific American (May 2001) in which he described the web of the future as one where computers would be able to manipulate web content to find meaningful and relevant results for the end user.

Several semantic search engines are under development.

Using sophisticated semantic web searching technology – patent pending – Sensebot searches Google, Yahoo or MSN and generates a summary of the top result pages. Its technology includes “text mining” of documents to identify concepts, weighting of concepts depending on closeness to query and then the construction (or “summarization”) of content according to the Sensebot algorithm. This gives the end user an overview of a topic, event or phenomenon rather than just a list of relevant weblinks.

Try out Sensbot at the link below. What do you think will be the impact on education?

www.sensebot.net

What is eRes?

gail.simmons — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:06:41 +0000

The library maintains an electronic reserve collection of articles, chapters, forms and information sheets which students can access online from any computer with internet access.

Teachers provide the eRes password to students during class time to allow students to access the information and to ensure compliance with copyright.

If you would like to maximise access to essential readings or hard-to-locate information why not use eRes?

If you would like more information follow the link below.

eRes – http://www.sit.det.nsw.edu.au/eres