Using Print-Friendly to print webpages

Recently when students ask for help printing "clean" webpages without ads, images, and awkward formatting, I've been recommending they use the Print Friendly and PDF tool at https://www.printfriendly.com/. It presents a printer friendly version of a webpage by removing ads and any unnecessary formatting and spacing, allows the removal of portions of text, and also offers an option to save the webpage content as a pdf.

Google Search Education

This is very interesting! Google has a whole page dedicated to search education tools - i.e. lesson plans geared towards teaching people how to use Google. While it's necessarily a bit Google-promoting, some of it could be pretty useful. It's primarily geared towards k-12, but some of the lessons could certainly be used with our lower level students who haven't had as much exposure to web-searching. The video "How Google Works" is also pretty good, except for the second half which is a bit propoganda-ish. But the beginning information about how Google indexes the web is a nice explanation.





 

Dropbox.com

I don't know why I've never thought of this before, so I thought I'd share! A student just asked if she could save her work to a folder that she would then be able to access from anywhere on campus, and I instinctively told her no. Then I realized that I use dropbox.com for just that thing all the time, so I asked if she would be interested in that. The student must be willing to set up a username and password, but it's a free service. The website makes it appear that you need to download the program onto the computer, but that is not necessary. Here's a video for setting up dropbox.com without the download.



Once they've set up a dropbox, they can go to dropbox.com from any computer, log in, and access whatever documents they've uploaded.

Local newspapers online

Here is a great site for online local newspapers.


http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/usstate/usnewjer.htm

Bob

New url for Print Release

http://printsrv:9191 will display all print jobs for all printers in the library (Updated May 2011)

PREZI - Fun new presentation tool

At NJLA, Bob saw a presentation that used Prezi instead of Powerpoint, so I decided to play around and see what it was all about. Fun stuff!!

Prezi is an online presentation tool that enables you to create radically different presentations from what we're used to with Powerpoint. Instead of individual slides, you create your presentation on one large canvas and use set up your presentation to navigate around that canvas. Below is a Prezi presentation I just threw together in about 20 minutes. (At this point, you have to keep clicking the forward arrow to go through the presentation - I haven't yet figured out how to make it play video-style.)

Why Cite? on Prezi

It's very simple to use; I created this one after watching about 5 minutes worth of tutorials on their website. However, because it's simple to use, it seems like the functionality is a bit limited. I haven't explored all of the options yet, so the above presentation is very basic, but you can see immediately the different style Prezi uses and how this could make for more interesting - and better organized - presentations.

If you want to try it out, go to http://prezi.com/profile/signup/ and click the link for Student/Teacher Licenses. The free educator version has more features than the free public one. All that is required is to sign up with your college email address and provide the college's website address when asked.

Google's Wonder Wheel for keyword instruction

Have you seen Google's Wonder Wheel? I just learned about it on the ILI-L listserv, and it's a pretty fun feature. Similar to the concept map available in Credo Reference, the Wonder Wheel takes the keywords you enter in a Google search and displays them in a concept map with other relevant search terms/phrases. The Wonder Wheel is in the middle of the screen with results for the main search term to the right. If you click a search term that is linked on the wheel, the search terms on the right change to websites relevant to that search term.

When looking at results for a Google search, click Show Options from the top left. Then along the left side of the screen, scroll down and select Wonder Wheel to see your results in this view. Detailed instructions are available here.

This might be an interesting and engaging way to get students thinking about keywords in an info lit session. They will be more interested in anything coming from Google than what we come up with, but it gets across the idea that there are other ways to phrase a particular search idea. Although many of the initial "spokes" on the wheel are very similar to the first search, there are slight variations that ultimately bring up different results. This is a concept that I think our students struggle with, as they constantly put the same phrase over and over again into every search and wonder why they can't find anything useful!

Do you see any potential uses for this tool?

CHOICE Websites

CHOICE frequently reviews websites, many of which are freely accessible. I thought I'd share a batch of recent ones.

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
"provides hourly updates on business ethics and human rights news and reports" for over 4000 companies worldwide.

Leight Hunt Online: The Letters
"electronic access to...surviving correspondence of the British Romantic poet" in facsimile images. Uses OCLC's CONTENTdm as its platform.

International Children's Digital Library: A Library for the World's Children
"an international collection that...appeal[s] to children ages 3-13 (all over the world) and...provide[s] quality literature...Contains more than 10,000 digitized children's books in 54 languages."

The Torture Archive
"provides access to over 83,000 pages (with more materials to be added) of primary documents concerning the detention and interrogation of individuals by the US government."

English Short Title Catalogue
"designed to include a bibliographic record, with holdings, of every surviving copy of letterpress produced in Great Britain or any of its dependencies, in any language, worldwide, from 1473 to 1800." (Sounds like Worldcat with a Brit-centric spin)

The Federal Reserve Board: Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions
The Beige Book from the Federal Reserve, online. Great for "undergraduate students seeking up-to-date, easily digestible commentary on the economy."

William Faulkner on the Web
"biography, Yoknapatawpha locale, synopses, annotated character listings, critical resources, and links to other important Web sources...student friendly site even offers MLA citation models for each of its pages."

Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence
"Their goal is to craft an academically viable, peer-reviewed online encyclopedia while also creating an important base of knowledge for the world community on this...topic."

Tutorialized: Photoshop Tutorials and Flash Tutorials
"over 3,000 Flash tutorials and over 12,000 Photoshop tutorials, along with hundreds of lessons covering other graphics software as well."

Find your legislator assignment

I get this assignment at the reference desk every semester, and have already had one ambitious student asking how to find the information. Perhaps a throwback assignment to when it was necessary to use reference books for this, but the assignment is simply for the student to find the state senators and assemblymen and federal senators and representatives for their hometown. Although this information is easily found online (easily, maybe only for librarians??), students seem to have a lot of questions about how to find it!!

I've put together this webpage with links to get them started on their search. Although the right Google search will take them directly to the information they need, I've included links to the homepages so that they have to do a teeny bit of searching and website evaluation to get the answers. Feel free to give the tiny URL out to students if they will find it useful.

https://sites.google.com/site/dempseyrvcc/all-assignments/find-your-senator--congressmen

http://tinyurl.com/njlegislator

OpenOffice and other free software

I can never remember the free software that replicates a lot of Microsoft Office tools, but found it again today in a Lifehacker blogpost, so I'm reposting it here to never lose it again! OpenOffice.org describes itself as, "the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose."

This software is one of Lifehacker's "61 Free Apps We're Most Thankful For", which is a good read in itself.

Time's 50 Best Websites of 2009

Some you know, some you might not, but an interesting list.

50 Best Websites

Free foreign language resource

BBC Languages offers lessons in a number of foreign languages for free for beginners. The lessons appear to be mostly video based and to help beginners learn things like how to order in a restaurant and such. This could be a great resource to point users to, and they offer free "12 week courses" online as well. I found about it from Librarianinblack.net, who said this:

I was astounded by the amount of language learning material available on their website for free. The full beginner’s courses (12 weeks long) are available in 4 languages. The site also provides audio & video courses for learning Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Gaelic (!), and so on. And, finally, the site covers essential phrases in 36 languages. It is easy to use and the language materials are practical, rather than esoteric. Congrats BBC on yet another top notch resource.

Economic Recovery Wiki & Virtual Career Center

NJLA has published the Economic Recovery Wiki and Virtual Career Center, available at http://njslrecovery.pbworks.com/. They are allowing NJ libraries to activate accounts and contribute, but limiting accounts to one per institution. If anyone would like to contribute to the wiki, feel free to contact them about establishing an account, but please make it a generic log-on/password that all of us will be able to use.

New York Times Video site

The New York Times video page hosts a decent collection of news video clips. It can be accessed from NY Times homepage using the Video tab, or directly at http://video.on.nytimes.com/. There is a category listing, a search box, and a "Most Watched" feature to find and select videos.

It looks like there is some good content here relevant to typical English I research topics. Introducing a topic through video is a great attention grabber, and can be used to start a discussion about how one might go about further researching the issue presented in the video.

Useful websites in our catalog

Did you know you can access a lot of useful reference websites directly from our catalog? Bob provided me with the following list of reference sources whose websites are available from our catalog. Thanks Bob!

United States Senate
US Courts: The Federal Judiciary
Basic Facts about Trademarks
The World Factbook
United States Code
The White House
United States House of Representatives
Vital Statistics of the United States - we discarded the print and will now rely on the electronic version for this reference!
The Library of Congress
Dictionary of Occupational Titles Index
Agricultural Statistics Database
Digest of Education Statistics
Constitution
Official Congressional Directory
National Center for Health Statistics
Reports of the Surgeon General
Where to write for vital records
National Transportation Statistics
Bureau of Labor Statistics
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
MedlinePlus
USA.gov
US Securities and Exchange Commission
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
The Consumer Action Website: Federal Citizen Information Center
GPO Access - a service of the US Government Printing Office
Consumer.gov - your resource for consumer information from the federal government
Recalls.gov - your online resource for recalls
Travel.state.gov
Federal Reserve Bulletin
The Federal Register
MapMachine

-Megan