Thing 17: ELM Tools

It is good to be redirected to the many services ELM provides us. We are indeed blessed to have this service provided for our state. Miss Shelved sings the praises to staff and families, but rarely do we get to see if there are results. Now we have a few more goodies to share. It's easy to e-mail a useful article to a colleague. We were especially delighted to find a terrific book (E-Parenting) available in full text through the eBook library. We will highly recommend it at our next family internet night. Quick tip: have children sort the mail as a great way to teach what's junk and what isn't. What a terrific pre-research activity!

The various ways to gather information (e-mailing, RSS feeds, copying to flashdrive, saving in a folder) are lovely ideas to help staff use their time well. At the elementary level, however, we tend to ask students to do their research in a more immediate manner (and we give them the time to do so), else the "chase" becomes more important than actually absorbing the information. For the unsophisticated, an article copied or otherwise manipulated becomes a report written. We urge students to find it, read it, add the citation to your list, and take notes immediately. Touch it once and make it go away -- and remove the urge to plagiarize. Our students, at least so far, don't need more ways to rearrange the information they access. They need guidance to find the right material and then, despite sometimes amazing reluctance, they have to read it. Not bookmark it, print it, e-mail it home, or any of the other things they would dearly love to do to avoid actually interfacing with the text. Sad to say, we remain Luddites on this front: we say, "Dear, just read it and take notes, since that's what you're going to have to do anyway." That is one part of the research process technology will never change, and it's the part that is the hardest.