Evaluating websites exercise

I just gave my "Clean Off Your Google Goggles" Workshop for the 3rd time. This time was very successful. I presented the workshop, and then I had the students complete the exercise that is shown above. I think it really helped the students have an understanding of the quality of resources they will receive with using different search engines.

In this workshop, I also introduced how to search for only government websites in Google. This feature is at www.google.com/unclesam. This website will definitely be useful to our Criminal Justice students.


A Search for the "death penalty" is shown below. The students were able to see the quality of results were better than searching for the death penalty under the normal google.com platform.

** Sorry for cross posting. I also put this blog post on my personal/professional blog.

Open APA workshop success..

I have to share.. I did a workshop on Wednesday night, and 9 people came. I ran out of pizza! It was very exciting. To get the students there, I enticed them with advertising pizza and opportunities to get extra credit. I think most students were there for the extra credit.

I know some librarians are against bribing students with pizza or extra credit, BUT I made the students work. I got them in the door with the pizza and extra credit, but I think all the students learned a lot about APA/Noodlebib/paraphrasing/quoting. I created the powerpoint to be about Minnesota and specifically the Vikings.

You know the slide in Emily's ppt that has 2 columns?
You do not have to credit ____, you do have to credit ____? Well, I changed that slide to:

no credit: It snows in Minnesota
credit: The Metro region averaged 35.5 inches of snow in '06-07

no credit: Ice fishing is dangerous when there isn't enough ice
credit: Pickup trucks and large fish houses should be on ice at least 12 inches thick.

no credit: Minnesota is the home to the Minnesota Vikings football team.
credit: Ragnar is the Vikings' team mascot. He holds the current world record for fastest time shaving a beard with an ax.

*Since these MNstats were interesting to the students, I could tell that they were digesting the information.

Then, I had them practice paraphrasing and quoting from an article that I printed from the Minneapolis Star Tribune about the Vikings. I had them use Noodlebib to get a citation for that article. The students (especially males) were really engaged with reading the Vikings article and having to put the football article into their own words. I love using pop culture/regional culture to "make it click" with students.

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