Heads Up: especially MS/HS English Teachers

First of all, happy World Read-Aloud Day!

This is the week of Red Dot Book Awards voting.  This is an annual event of Singapore international schools -- and the multiple copies bought for this reading initiative become valuable extended reading & literature circle resources.

Please encourage your class to participate - or invite me to speak to your class for a 5-minute get-out-the-vote pitch.  The books have been up in the library for the past several months and I know a lot of your students have read at least two - which is all that is required to choose ONE per category.

Last votes must be in by a week from Friday.  Winners to be announced on Saturday, March 16th.

See this post on Red Dot Voting on the general Kishore Mahbubani Library blog - which has short 1-minute videos of the book covers flipping like pages - a quick reminder to students of the books up for the awards this year.

There's a QR code for mobile devices to read - making it easy to vote.  I will have my 12 library iPads up on the front desk ready for anyone to use.

NB: Our school code for voting is simply UWCEAST (the voting form asks for a code - so we can tell which school students are voting from).

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Trial Databases from Gale Cengage

As you know from the Friday, Feb. 8th Research Skills Professional Learning Day, we are working hard to get our digital resources easy to find and easy to use.  The place to always start (excuse the split infinitive) for all our UWCSEA links & logins -- as well as the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore eResources is:

research.uwcsea.edu.sg

For you English teachers, there are two trial subscriptions we have access to until March 15th -- and Susanne Clower, the Dover librarian, and I are anxious to know what you think of them.

You can access them via our Gale Cengage homepage -- on the right hand side.

Literature Criticism Online (read about it here) is a resource we buy once and own forever.  Like very expensive reference books.  Right now, I'm not sure we have the budget for it.

Literature Resource Center (read about it here) is an annual subscription.  It is also not cheap.  So if we buy it, we need to make sure it gets used.  Frankly, I think this is probably the better bet right now.  But if you don't think so, then I don't want to waste our money.

Please have a look at both of them.  Or feel free to tell me what kinds of research your students are likely to do and I will do some test searches myself.

Read ahead: Dylan Wiliam on assessment

As you know, Dylan Wiliam is coming to the East campus next week.

We have some of his books in the libraries (click here for a list), but as there aren't enough copies for everyone to read at once, why not read some of his key articles?

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Black, Paul et al. “Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom.” Phi Delta Kappan 86 (2004): 8. Print.

Black, Paul, and Dylan Wiliam. “A pleasant surprise.” Phi Delta Kappan 92 (2010): 47+. Print.

---. “Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment.” Phi Delta Kappan 80 (1998): 139+. Print.

---. “Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment: formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and can raise student achievement.” Phi Delta Kappan 92.1 (2010): 81+. Print.

Clymer, Jacqueline B., and Dylan Wiliam. “Improving the way we grade science.” Educational Leadership 64 (2006): 36+. Print.

Wiliam, Dylan. “Changing classroom practice.” Educational Leadership 65 (2007): 36+. Print.

---. “Feedback: part of a system.” Educational Leadership 70 (2012): 30–34. Print.

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You can read all the Phi Delta Kappan articles online or have them emailed to yourself using our new InfoTrac subscription.  It's an online database of 250 magazines which we are trialling on both campuses.  If it doesn't contain a magazine you're interested in, let me know.  We'll definitely be adjusting the titles available.

Click here to go to our new InfoTrac Magazines Online & access these articles by Dylan Wiliam 

If you are on campus, the link should put you directly into InfoTrac.

If it doesn't, you'll have to enter a password. Click here to open a Google Doc -- http://bit.ly/accessuwc -- that gives them all to you (or, rather, to anyone with a @gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg account).

Click here for a PDF that shows you step-by-step screenshots for articles in Phi Delta Kappan (as that is full-text complete in Infotrac).  It's a Google Doc accessible by anyone with a @gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg account - as I show you the password to Infotrac.

In the case of you finding an article for which Infotrac doesn't have the full-text, then we have other avenues.  E.g., for ASCD's Educational Leadership, you need to go to the website and know our institutional login.  Click here for the Google Doc where we are collecting such logins/passwords.  It is shared only with @gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg in the "allteachingstaff" list for Dover & East.

If you want to search ASCD's Educational Leadership for Dylan Wiliam articles, click here and login.

Magazines, Memberships & Digital Subscriptions

Here is an editable (to anyone logged into their UWCSEA Google Apps account) Google Doc spreadsheet which the librarians from both campuses are using as a working document to collect desired:  Magazines, Memberships, & Digital Subscriptions (i.e., databases).

Magazines have been the poor cousins over the past four years, in favor of building up the book collections.  But now we are actively trying to fill those gaps.

Have a look at the tentative magazine list -- and feel free to add any titles -- or to highlight any priorities (using the Insert / Comment function).  We will be investigating the cost/benefits of online digital access and/or print editions.

Professional memberships are another area which needs attention.  Are there professional memberships you (want to) subscribe to which come with online access or print magazines of interest?  Feel free to add any there -- with whatever information you have.

Re databases:  I'm pleased to announce we have recently subscribed to four of the ABC-Clio databases (the ones we were trialing earlier this year):  The World at War, World Geography, World History - Modern, and Issues: Understanding Controversy & Society -- which are well suited to middle/high school students -- as well as Project Muse, which will be more of an IB-DP and teacher resource.  These new ones will be available as of 01-Aug-12.

Do have a look at the databases available FREE via the National Library Board of Singapore.  (The ones most relevant to our students are listed on a separate tab in the spreadsheet -- to see the complete list go to: eResources.nlb.gov.sg .)  Note that there are several geared at educational research -- for those of you pursuing further education.