HIT:On Line Catalog Skills

[Pamela Berberich <pberberich@HOME.COM>]

Dear Group,

I had many requests for a Hit, and just several replies.  I am grateful
though for any beginning point.  So thank you again for my replies and I
hope this Hit is helpful to those who requested it :)

 From:
        Kathy Geronzin
I have taught this many times, but you have to teach to your
system.    Some of the tips I can give you are to make representations
of the screens they will use, I have done this by making transparencies
and explaining Boolean searching.  At first I made comparisons with the
card catalog, but now because some of the children have never seen a
card catalog I just teach the on-line catalog.  And let the children
practice using the different searches.  I always think of the on-line
catalog as a second generation of the card catalog because some of the
features remain the same and the fulfill the same needs.

From:
        Karo
I'm in a 3-5 grade school with 500+ students.  I demonstrate the on-line
catalog using a LCD projector (which you may not have access to), which
projects the computer screen on to a portable screen.  Then every child
has to pass a a quiz according to their grade level in order to use the
on-line catalog.  This has taken over a month since I only have 5 opacs
and the quizzes take some time to accomplish.  Questions are who is the
author of ______.  How many copies are checked in?  For 5th graders I
ask harder ques, i.e. how many of these are nonfic, how many are
biographies, etc.  They are required to know these by looking at the
call numbers.

From:
        Kathleen Niebuhr
I am new to media but spent 10 years in the high school business
classroom
and 5 years as a dean.  I am now working in 2 k-5 buildings.  One of the
things I do with my 2-5 graders is use our WebPAC to teach some basic
search
strategies.

We've done some searches using title search using David. We were trying
to
find the book No David.  We tried title search and found that it didn't
come
up as it was not the first word of the title.  We then did an author
search--of course didn't work.  Then we did the keyword search and they
were
amazed.  I can project the webpac screen and then show them that it
searches
the entire record when doing the keyword search.

This week we did searches with plurals and singulars.  Wolf and Wolves,
Dog
and Dogs,etc.  We talked about which would get more results.  Dog got us
1.
Dogs got us 480+.  However Wolf got us 43 and wolves got us 80+.

Haven't decided what we are doing yet.  But with 4-5 graders we have
been
doing some searched with our World Book Online and using search
directories
like Yahooligans, Ask Jeeves for kids and Searchopolis using the "help"
features of each to see if we should be using "and" or "+" when using
multiple search terms.

That seems to have helped some of our students and our teachers are
helping
to reinforce this when they do internet searches and lessons with
students.

Not that experienced to share much more, but I think we have to keep
reinforcing these skills with kids younger and younger.  Last year when
I
taught high school students and we did some searching on the net, I
tried
some boolean operators with them when doing searches and they were
"amazed"
that it made a difference!!

From:
        "katrina yurenka"
I used the Proxima machine with all students K-6 (projecter that
connects to
computer and projects monitor image on screen).  This way you can go
over
each item step by step and answer questions to the entire group.

From:
            "Barbara Braxton"
The most successful lessons I have done with our Year 4/5 kids were the
ones
where each couple sat down in front of the OPAC WITHOUT any instructions
in
its use, and were challenged to explore it thoroughly and create a set
of
instructions for a simple search for the younger kids.

The younger kids then used these instructions EXACTLY to try to locate a
book.  They brought any problems to me and I noted the cause (lack of
direction, poorly worded instruction etc) and then gave the annotated
instructions back to the creators to modify.  The VERY best were
displayed
beside each OPAC for student future reference.

Very powerful - ownership, purpose, real-world feedback, everything.
Most
kids now go straight to the OPAC if they are searching for something
specifically as it capitalizes on the intrinsic appeal of the medium.
Now,
if I could just get the staff to do the same thing!

Mind you, we have 16 OPAC computers in the RC that the kids can access
at
the same time, so that made it easier.


Thank you all again.


--
Pam Berberich; Library Media Technician
Anza Elementary School, El Cajon, CA
pberberich@home.com

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