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Dan: Welcome to the Full Circle Resource Kit Podcast and today I have with me actually two of the creators of the Resource Kits, Dennis O'Connor and Carl Heine. We're going to talk with Dennis first. The topic of this Resource Kit is how to use the Resource Kits in the schools. So Dennis I would like to start off by asking you, How do you envision seeing these Resource Kits being used for professional development?

Dennis: Well, we know that the library media specialists and technology directors in particular often catch the opportunity to provide inservice for their staff. So let's imagine we're at the beginning of the year and the library media specialist knows that there is a lot of different folks that are going to be doing research out there. We're going to have research going on in the English Department, we're going to have research going on in Social Studies and she would like to offer and inservice to her teachers to introduce search skills to the students. Well, we know that teachers need to have that work done themselves so you start by introducing the tools and training the staff to search in a more powerful way.

Well, we have lots of modularized content that will break search down, provide people with some easy to learn, very powerful applications and tricks and tips, will improve their search skills, build their confidence and probably make them more likely to work with the library media specialist in a research project because they will see the benefit.

Our materials are designed to address that age-old problem of: I put the kids on the Internet, they spend all their time searching, bouncing around, they never get anything good, they get distracted, they waste time. With a little training up front that doesn't happen.

That would be one way that I think these courses, or these materials could be used for professional development. Oftentimes there is a need for a short piece once or twice a month at a staff meeting. Well, popping one of these Kits up on the screen is a great way to just highlight a resource and just talk about what is going on.

Dan: Dennis it sounds like the ultimate goal here is that teachers use the activities from the Resource Kits in their classrooms. So give us some ideas on how teachers can do that.

Dennis: Oh, we know that educators are always looking for good materials and what we want to do is suggest some ways they can blend information fluency into their existing curriculum so that it acts as part of the soup. It's a foundation ingredient as far as I'm concerned. But I don't believe that anybody is going to be able to make time to just teach information fluency.

Now, let's imagine you are a teacher in a classroom and you have some computer workstations in your room. In that case then that sort of stand-alone, on-demand aspect of the tools that we provide, especially the learning games could be a real nice component for your planning. You may
use some workstations, you may include that element as part of a project and rotate teams through it. There are so many ways that teachers can get inventive with this material. As long as they don't have to spend a great deal of time digging it out of the site and that's why we are going to kind of pre-dig things for them and bring them to the surface and make them easy to grasp.

Dan: And you don't necessarily need a computer for every student.

Dennis: No. You can team kids up. That is often a strong way to do things is to have a little bit of interactive group work - have a recorder, have a searcher, have a summarizer, have a timekeeper. Put them all together and have them work through a task. They can play games as a team. There is a lot of debate and discussion that can go on.

If they are working with one of our evaluation games where you determine the bias or credibility of a web site. Well, that's a chance for the team to discuss it and that's where the thinking will take place. They will start talking to each other about it and then they'll make a team decision and see what the consequences are. Those are just some of the things that can be done with this.

Dan: Great. Well, thank you so much Dennis and search just go easier. That's a wonderful thing, we all like that. Thank you for all the great work you doing on putting all these Kits together and making them practical resources for those who are interested, curious and passionate about information fluency.

Dennis: Thank you, Dan. I think that describes us all.

Dan:  In the second part of this podcast, we join Carl Heine as he describes some novel approaches to teaching information fluency.

Carl: So, this experiment that I tried yesterday was to see if I could come up with half a dozen lessons - how hard that would be - just using existing lessons that I found on the Internet - free ones. And just seeing if I could connect them with core competencies and our Resource Kit games and other things that we've got there. And I found it wasn't too hard.

First of all, it really helps to have core competencies in mind rather than, 'How am I going to use the Keyword Search game?' or something like that.

Dan: So starting out with the actual skill that you want to teach and then looking for something in the Resource Kit that addresses that skill.

Carl: Right, right. So I went out and tried to find some Language Arts, and Science and Social Studies lesson. One of the lessons I found was an upper elementary parts of speech lesson. I thought it was quite clever. It's completely offline in which a teacher diagrams a sentence by putting each word on a separate card. Well, that already starts to sound like the Keyword Challenge doesn't it?

In this example - and we'll cite this so if people want to go to it to see the original lesson - the teacher has the students take a card. They stand up in front of the classroom, there's not enough cards for everybody so the rest of the students who are seated then diagram the sentence by making some sort of a visual map of the students who are holding cards.

So it diagrams the parts of speech. I think they have to put the sentence in order first of all and then they have to identify the subject, the predicate and all the parts of speech down to the articles. Well, it's a natural extension to that to say, 'OK, if we were looking for this information online, what words would be most important?'

Dan: Ya. (laughing)

Carl: All of a sudden we have parts of speech sitting down. And you are not even using a computer. I think if you go offline sometime by choice or by accident this is probably a pretty good way to do this activity.

Dan: Excellent, ya. So you visually see people - or the keywords - left standing and the other words are removed from the equation.

Carl: And you soon realize that it's the nouns - the proper nouns especially - and some of the adjectives that are still standing. The verbs are pretty much sitting down, all the articles and prepositions - they are gone - because they are all stop words most of the time. And you have a chance to talk about, 'How do you identify the key ideas and what's this sentence really mean?' and 'How would a search engine make meaning out of this?'

Dan: And I could see that working, I mean Dennis had also mentioned earlier, that doing these kinds of activities in professional development. You could do that with a group of teachers and have them diagram and sentence and get it ready for a search engine even if you didn't have a computer. That's excellent.

Carl: So you can use them as introductory activities, kind of a followup if students are struggling, and then extension activities as well. And that's the Keyword Challenge. I only looked at three core competencies in my little experiment yesterday and that was one of them - you know - finding the concepts in a research question.

So, again, the ideas are all there. I think they are pretty natural connections to information fluency competencies but for a teacher to take this approach he or she always has to be looking for opportunities. You know, 'What's an online opportunity here?' And maybe a lot of teachers aren't really looking for those because they require work. They don't require a whole lot more time, still those opportunities have to be sought out.

Dan: Well, and I think that's a key point that you are making here that if we have our antennas up looking for places where there is an information fluency core competency that we can address as part of a lesson then the Resource Kits end up being a great place to go to actually develop that little activity. In a lot of ways some of the hard work has already been done. But the operative word here is that you are looking for the opportunity.

Carl: Ya, you are. It's the whole field of customization. You know as a lot of plugin activities that we've got - there's almost a hundred of them in the Resource Kits we came out with since last summer. You know it's almost overwhelming. So how do I pick and choose all these activities and find a home for them.

You know, 'Ok the Resource Kit gives me a science example but I'm not a science teacher so what do I do?' You know there's a generic root there - how do you use a resource for any subject? And I think with a little practice teachers can see that and adapt it for their own use.

Dan: It seems to me that the way that we sequence these could still come back to the core model that we have on the site, you know, as a place to start at least. And say, 'I can at least work my way around the circle of core competencies and maybe just try to look for those opportunities throughout the year.

Carl: I think that's a good way to go about it really. It takes some of the overwhelming capacity or characteristic away. If you could work through the first five of those in a school year that would at least give you some consistency.

Dan: Well, thank you so much Carl for these practical insights that you've given us about how to use the Resource Kits and we'll look forward to more good things to come.

Carl: Cool. Thank you.

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Dan:  This is a production of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at the Illinois Math and Science Academy.