By now you’ve likely heard that the PBS website was recently hacked. While this incident is incredibly unfortunate for PBS and Tupac fans, skilled librarians and media specialists can use it as a prime example during information literacy workshops and discussions with students. Many people would likely assume that PBS is always an accurate new source; however, this situation proves how very important it is to fact check and to consult a variety of sources before using and citing information from all sources, even those thought to be “reliable”. You never can be too careful!
Tag Archives: Information Literacy
Education Nation
NBC is launching a discussion, starting Monday, September 27th, on the topic of education in the United States. The mission statement for the week long segment is:
“Education Nation seeks to engage the public, through thoughtful dialogue, in pursuit of the shared goal of providing every American with an opportunity to pursue the best education in the world.”
Key political figures, decision makers, educators, parents, students, and the general public will come together to discuss all aspects of education (positive and negative), and determine why, in a nation that is founded on democracy, our students continue to fall behind.
Special events include a television interview with President Obama, a special appearance by Collin Powell and his wife Alma Powell, and an education summit with attendees such as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Multi-media coverage of the event will occur on the Nightly News, the Today Show, Meet the Press, MSNBC, ivillage.com, EducationNation.com, and several other news outlets.
For more information please go to http://www.educationnation.com/.
Information Literacy Programming with SCRATCH and SMILE: A CMLE Scholarship
The following report was submitted by a recipient of our new CMLE scholarship program.
Submitted By: Betsy Miller
For generations our family has loved visiting the North Shore. When I received an email announcing that MINITEX was sponsoring a free workshop in Grand Marais this past August, I decided to attend. The combination of Lake Superior, learning something new and FREE was definitely a winner.
The workshop was Information Literacy Programming with SCRATCH and SMILE presented by Jennifer Nelson of the Hennepin County Library and Keith Braafladt of the Science Museum of Minnesota at the Cook County High School Media Center. They gave us a great deal of information as we experienced a hands-on workshop of practical Web sites I will continue to use.
SCRATCH is new to me but has been around for awhile both in time and geographically as it is used all over the world. It is a programming language used to create interactive stories, games and animations. The home page is found at http://scratch.mit.edu/ giving over a million projects that others have created. This is also the page where the free download is available for you to begin your own Scratch projects. There are several online tutorials giving you step by step directions to get started or to challenge you once you get going. As a teacher I find Scratch Ed to be very helpful, http://scratched.media.mit.edu/, giving resources and ideas for using Scratch in the classroom.
SMILE (Science and Math Informal Learning Educators) was also part of the workshop. This is a great online clearinghouse for math and science activities. The site, http://howtosmile.org/, partners with the Lawrence Hall of Science, Exploratorium, New York Hall of Science, Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Children’s Museum of Houston to bring activities of all kinds to kids of all ages.