How to Write a Good Essay podcasts from a Uni in Wales

The latest post on the Information Literacy Weblog, is part of a continuing report from the LILAC 2008 conference held recently in the UK (Liverpool, Mar. 17-19). One section referred to a series of podcasts produced by the radio station at the University of Cardiff in Wales called "Student Survival Guide To Writing A Good Essay." The six shows are well-produced and professional in quality. They include interviews with university students about their experiences with writing reports (locating sources, procrastination, etc.) as well as comments from librarians, professors, counselors and other students about ways to overcome the obstacles to producing a good paper.
Worth a glance and even worth sharing with your students (even though the accents are a bit foreign to our cosmopolitan, digital natives!)

Thanks to Dangerously Irrelevant: Nathan Lowell

Thanks to Ted Brown, a social studies teacher at Redwood, I was recently introduced to Dangerously Irrelevant, a wonderful blog out of CASTLE, the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education. (What a concept--technologically trained administrators!) That blog in turn lead me to these three videos by Nathan Lowell. They are well worth taking a look at.







Wonderful, provocative videos for those of us engaged in the educational endeavor.

Amazon Wish List Widget

I was just able to add a widget for an Amazon Wish List to my library news blog.

In order to do it, of course you have have an Amazon account which can be made public. Since I have two separate accounts, one personal and one for school, I was able to designate which one I wanted made public.

Once you've gone through the steps there is a place on the Wish List page which allows you to share your wish list in various ways. I chose to use a widget since I'm still not set up to email all my parents, students, etc. (I'll do that eventually as well).
I put the widget on the news blog because that made the most sense to me and I don't really have room for it on my main page at this point. However, I was able to put a button on the page which links to the wish list. I also found the code for the button on the Amazon's Wish List page.

I also posted an article in the parent newsletter recently (you can find it on the news blog as well) which explains several ways parents (anyone viewing at the website) can contribute to the library. It includes buying through Amazon Associates account, a new product called GiftLit, and a link to our local independent bookstore.

Check it out. You may find it useful.