Friday, February 22, 2013

RVOneSearch - Great Example


I just wanted to share what I found to be a great example using RVOneSearch for English I type topics. I often use television advertising to children as a sample topic, based on the The Say I Say reading about Ronald McDonald, because many of the Eng I classes read this essay. I did a keyword search for "children and television advertising" and the first page of results is a great way to demonstrate how RVOS brings up different sources types on the same topic. There are several books first, and the immediate benefit of viewing catalog records in RVOS is that the subject headings are visible on the initial results list. So I can show them that there are several subjects related to my idea and get into the concept of subject terms without it being a very overwhelming description. The first academic journal source has a great title, "Children's attitudinal reactions to TV advertisements," but when you look at the abstract you discover it's about children in African countries, letting me teach them the title isn't the only thing you need to go by. As you keep going down the list, #15 is one of our Films on Demand titles, which can be viewed with one click from RVOS. I rarely have a chance to show this great resource easily, but now here it is. And #19 is probably the best article for the sample research topic I use, which gives me the chance to show them that you can't rely on just the first five results. 

I haven't taught it yet, but I feel like this is going to be a great "canned" example to show many facets of RVOS. Have you tried any others that work really well?

Friday, February 15, 2013

Problem based learning ideas

I just found this nice page of ideas for "problem based learning" prompts. The idea behind PBL's is that you give students a real-world scenario to research through. These are useful when you know a class will be coming without an assignment or topics, which hopefully doesn't happen too often. :)
http://libguides.bgsu.edu/content.php?pid=266315&sid=2198707