As Web coverage and content continue to expand and change, it is increasingly difficult and time-consuming for teachers and librarians to find accurate, reliable education sites. This practical session covers some highly rated educational directories and portals that carefully evaluate resources for inclusion into school collections. Rob Lackie will also explore an educator’s list of “top 10” Web sites that can make teaching, learning, and research easier. You’ll learn how to find and select appropriate Web-based educational resources and how to find invisible Web resources for educational topics.

The Internet delivers deep knowledge and a global perspective when you and your students use the right tools in the
right way. In this session, you'll learn how to find and use Webcams on the Internet that allow students to safely
visit places and see sights far from home in real time. Discover where to see animals in their natural habitat,
buildings being built, and news as it is broadcast from around the world. In addition, you'll learn how to find
Internet projects in different countries, how to incorporate them into your curriculum, and how to create Internet
project for your own students that use input from classes anywhere in the world.

Project-based learning using information technology (IT) is a great way to develop challenging, standards-based, multidisciplinary learning experiences that motivate your students to become lifelong learners. This session provides specific ideas for integrating IT into K-12 classrooms and gives you resources and directions for creating customized research projects that will engage your students, meet curriculum standards, and support information-literacy skills.

A new approach to building, enhancing, or advancing curriculum teaching units is under development in Portland using online pathfinder methodology. The collaborative process invites the participation of school librarians, classroom teachers, curriculum specialists, and the professional staff from the public library. Not only is the pathfinder built by district and community resources, but once created, it is interactive, upgradeable, and available to any district teacher. In this session, you’ll hear how and why this process is faster and more robust than traditional curriculum development methods, and how it eliminates the brick-and-mortar limitation of an individual library serving an individual school building.

For classroom teachers, finding the time and opportunity to master and harness technology is increasingly difficult. Picking up the basics of PowerPoint, learning to mail-merge, calculating weighted averages in Excel, using (and being able to show students) tools for creating Web sites—these are skills teachers need but may not be acquiring. In this session, you’ll hear about an online approach to professional development, using First Class e-mail, that offers faculty the same technology courses and lessons taught to students. This program can be fine-tuned to your schools’ individual applications and needs, and does not require scheduled classes.

The Web and Web tools make it soooo easy to grab text, not to mention images, and use them at will. Of course, you’ve been telling your students not to cut and paste, but are you teaching the specific skills they need to avoid plagiarism? Do your students know the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing? Do they know how and when to quote a source directly? Do they recognize common knowledge? Do they understand how to develop their own opinions and voice? This hands-on session will offer ideas and strategies for working with students to provide these essential skills.

As graphics become increasingly important in today’s visual world, students and teachers need to be aware of best practices for their use. This session highlights three areas of concern: respecting intellectual property, encouraging original work, and helping students with basic design tenets. Too often, students cut and paste photographs and other graphics into projects without citing sources. In addition, teachers may now be less inclined to encourage original artwork from students than when images were not so readily available online, thus requiring less creativity from them. Students may also need a few basic concepts about design to create attractive and useful products. By incorporating these concepts into instruction and by modeling positive use of graphics themselves, teachers and librarians can improve the quality of student projects and increase student knowledge about the proper use of images.

A library may have many wonderful print and electronic resources, but if they are not used to directly influence student achievement, the library program isn’t fulfilling its potential. Learn in this session about set of strategies and classes to encourage teachers to use library media resources in their curriculum. You’ll discover several types of enticements you can use, plus a collaboration template to plan technology integration and information literacy into a standards-based lesson.

In this session, you’ll learn how three librarians collaborate to introduce district databases and basic database search strategies to parents of students in their collective learning community, empowering the parents to work alongside their students as they do topic research. By the end of the session, you’ll have the knowledge plus the PR tools and templates to do the same for parents in your district in a fun and meaningful way!