Thing 16 -- Student 2.0 Tools

The Assignment Calculator and Research Project Calculator (RPC) are very cool! I wish they'd been around when I was in high school, or that I had known about them in my college years.

I browsed through them both (although the RPC seems to have a lot more to offer, in terms of support materials and links). The Assignment Calculator provides a lot of great practical hints for the U of M student. It is geared to a research paper format, providing a 12-step research guide and timeline for the project. It recommends resources and strategies for completion of the paper.

The RPC offers guidelines for two other project types -- slideshow, and video. I don't know how often those types of projects are done in the secondary environment, but the availability allows for "compare and contrast" activity. The RPC site had some great support materials. The Glossary of Terms would be helpful to a student struggling with concepts, and the teacher or librarian trying to assist her. The MEMO Standards for Information and Technology Literacy are linked to, as well as the Metronet Information Literacy Initiative (MILI) "dribbling exercises."

I added links on my blog to many of these things -- they are so valuable! I've always thought that information literacy is of utmost importance to the student, the school, and the library, and there is so much here that is helpful.

I would love to have a chance to show the RPC to a secondary student. I think that they would appreciate the automation idea, the way that the tool helps them organize and to plan their time to accomplish the goal. The RPC is really easy to use -- I entered a "calculation" for the remainder of Things that I need to complete for this project, and emailed the overview to myself.

In the same way that I linked to these tools on my blog, I think that libraries could link to them on their webpages, on the first page of a separate youth page, or even on the main page. So much great work has been done already, and the library (school or public) should take advantage of it.

It would be great to have school and public libraries work together when research projects are assigned, focusing on these tools. Kids often come to the public library, looking for books on a topic, but if the librarian had a "heads up" on the assignment, the end result would be better. If the teacher, the school library, and the public library were all using the same tools, no doubt, the student would benefit.