Educational Information Sources Online

I've designed two new blogs, as companions to my Web Tools Workshop and my Educational Uses of Weblogs Workshop. Here they are:

Web Tools

Presentation Blog 

The Museum Education Consortium of Western New York has collaborated with a number of local organizations to link to each org's websites and listings of educational programs. There are links to the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Zoo, Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, Botanical Gardens, Theodore Roosevelt Inagural Site, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Naval & Military Museum and the Buffalo Science Center.

CARLI is the Consortium of Research Libraries in Illinois and this site has a number of flash tutorials on how to conduct searches in their databases. Interesting if you're in charge of designing this type of thing for your patrons and students.

The Informed Librarian Online is a "monthly compilation of the most recent tables of contents from over 305 titles - valuable domestic and foreign library and information-related journals, e-journals, magazines, e-magazines, newsletters and e-newsletters. View the list in subject collections."

OPAL is an online forum for library training, including archived web sessions. Here's what they have to say:

OPAL is an international collaborative effort by libraries of all types to provide web-based programs and training for library users and library staff members.

These live events are held in online rooms where participants can interact via voice-over-IP, text chatting, and synchronized browsing.

Everyone is welcome to participate in OPAL programs. There is no need to register. OPAL programs are offered free of charge to participants. 

CLUSTY is the newest search engine idea, that goes beyond meta-searching (such as Dogpile, which offers results from multiple search engines in one query). The idea is to group your search results into clusters that are connected and in a heirarchal format. Try it. Very interesting. You can see your FAQs answered here.

The link to this compilation of information about teaching critical thinking skills was posted on one of my library listservs. I thought it ties in nicely with information literacy skills education. There are articles, ideas, rubrics and more.

I found this site, somehow, I can't remember now how I came across it. Oh, someone linked to my other site via this and I saw it in my stats. It's a search engine for grabbing archived (cached?) website information. Kind of a neat concept. Still experimenting with the Internet Archive WaybackMachine. Cool name in any case. I think it would be useful if you have a date or dates you viewed info but can't remember the URLs, etc.

Here's a great tool that I happened across today. If you're interested in doing podcasts or making your own (or editing) sound files for presentations, among other things, the Audacity Free Audio Sound Editor is perfect. It's a cross-platform application that is cost free as well as being open source. I've already downloaded it and it's very userfriendly and working great already. I've used at least three other costly programs that never worked correctly, didn't translate well to other platforms, and cost money that ended up being wasted. This is a great program. Try it :)

    Reference Book of the Day blog is just what the name implies. Here is a new book reviewed briefly in each post, for those of us interested in such things. A good way to see an overview of what's there is to click on the ARCHIVES link on the left sidebar and then scroll down to the blue SUBJECTS link.