Introduction to My Journey in Learning

Hi my name is Sue and I am a grade 1/2 teacher in Vancouver.  I have never worked in a school library in my life but hope to one day.  After looking through the content to be covered in this course, I have come to the conclusion that I know very little about selecting resources for a school library. 

After working through lesson one and reading Riedling's list of definitions I came to the conclusion that I was unaware of many of the terms used in reference sources.  For example, like many people in our class, the term "Gazetteer" was a new word. I had never heard it before.  I am familiar with the basic terms such as Almanac, Bibliography, Big6 Problem Solving Model, CD-Roms, databases, dictionary, directory, DVD, Encyclopedia, Thesaurus, and weeding. 

Since I have had no experience with most of these definitions I don't find any of them to be surprising. The ones that I would like some discussion on would be the On Line resources since I am unfamiliar with them and have no idea how to even go about accessing them (OCLC, OPAC, RLIN)

Working through LLED 469 Project Based Learning introduced me to many of learning resource based models available to use with the children.  I particularly like BC's The Points of Inquiry as it breaks up the research model into grade specific objectives and provides examples of what can be done at each grade level.  I like the fact that it teaches the children to locate and search out appropriate information rather than just copying and pasting information found on the web.  This goes well with Jody's comment about plagiarism.  The children need to be informed that merely copying someone else's work is unacceptable