Library orientation - 2013

I sat in on one of our 7th graders' library orientation yesterday. It was about 20 minutes long and here is how it went....

Physical library (5 minutes):

• Here's the fiction
• Here's the nonfiction
• Here are the magazines

Digital library (15 minutes):

• Here's the student portal to your gradebook, assignments, attendance, lunch info ... and a link to the mobile versions for your phones
• Here's the Moodle link that your will need to access materials in many of your classes
• Here's the link to the digital versions of all your textbooks (so you don't have to drag the print ones home)
• Here the link to the library catalog and your space in it (Destiny Quest), where you can find lists of the 10 most popular books, 10 books most recently added to the collection, and place to post your own book reviews
• Here's the link to GoogleApps for Education for your e-mail, calendar,  file storage, and application programs
• Here's the link to Homework Helper
• Here's the link to iPad resources
• Here are the links to our e-book collections, our online reference resources, our full text magazine databases

I wonder if today's 7th graders are even the slightest awe about the wealth of resources available to them that simply did not exist even five years ago. They've used most, if not all of them in grade school, so no one seemed fazed during orientation.

Except me. I knew all this stuff - but to see it all at one time in one place left me a little gobsmacked, not just at the quanity, quality and variety or resources, but at the librarian's mastery of them. Truly, a virtual librarian.

Comments

[Kenn Gorman]

I think every school library should have a stack of index cards just to show students what it used to be like - and then when a students says that they cannot find anything, point to the cards...

[Doug Johnson]

Or a Readers Guide to Periodical Literature!

Doug