I’m famous!

No, not really.  Clue 49 is “Millie Helper’s next door neighbor” – for which the answer is Laura Petrie, not me.  But still, for a few moments, my father had a thrill answering the Washington Post’s July 14th crossword!

Back to the basics

Because so many of our 9th grade students are new this year (over half the class) and because even those that came from our Middle School have managed to forget anything they knew about library research over the summer, the 9th grade History Team and I have created a series of assignments that will get them looking at books, thinking about resources and using the library.

As always, I created a Libguide to help. This one is a little special: there’s a tutorial there that is based on a great tutorial I found. The wonderful librarians at SWITCH said I could download the files (they’d based their tutorials on WMU’s original!) and customize away – it’s been a long time since I hard-coded HTML, and my Photoshop skills aren’t great, but after a few days hard work, it’s done! As time allows, I’m modify it even further…

I’m excited to see how (if?!) this helps our students get comfortable with the research process.

My six

Doug started a meme:

Remember the days of “memes?” Blog this challenge on your site! What are your 6 essential tools and 2 essential devices?

After pondering this on my way home, weighing the sites I visit and use regularly, it’s really pretty simple.

Essential tools/websites:

• Gmail (staying in touch)
• Bank of America (for online banking)
• Facebook (seeing what my friends are up to)
• Google Reader (as Doug does, I’m cheating with an RSS feeder!)
• Goodreads (to keep track of my books and review those I’ve read)
• Twitter (again, seeing what my friends are up to/staying in touch with my PLN)

Essential devices

• DVR
• iPod (not my iPhone, because I’m not a huge cell phone user and use that mostly when travelling, but I use my iPod daily while commuting)

Tag – you’re it!