TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

Our friends in the library are offering two workshops this January that may be of interest to you:

Putting Reading Lists Online in Refshare
Thursday January 8th, 10-Noon
Learn how to use the RefShare feature in RefWorks to create reading lists you can share that link back to the library’s subscriptions and print holdings. We’ll show you how to import RefShare reading lists into SPARK courses, course blogs, Web pages and emails. Your students and colleagues can then export the reading lists into their own RefWorks accounts.

Finding Library Resources
Tuesday January 20th, 2-3:30
Tired of students referencing Wikipedia articles, blog posts and anonymous, dead-wrong Web sites? In this workshop you will hear about the vast number of credible online resources available through the library. We will also discuss ways that links to these resources can be added to SPARK, blogs and other online tools so your students will find them as easy to use as the Google search box.

To register, email instruction@library.umass.edu

In addition to help in the libraries, you can now visit a librarian for research and reference assistance at a variety of locations across campus. Drop by to chat with your librarian and encourage your students to make use of library services for doing any research project!

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Isabel Espinal, our colleague in the library, has put together a great list of library resources and information literacy enhancements that will be of particular interest to faculty using SPARK, blogs, and other online learning tools.

• Add a link to the library subject research guide for your discipline. If no subject guide is available, contact your subject specialist librarian to see about creating one.

• Embed library course guides – even widgets – into SPARK, blogs, and web pages.

• Make sure students do not pay for articles found on Google and other searches that are already available to them through the Libraries’ ejournal and research databases collections.

• Work with librarians to ensure students take full advantage of the high-quality resources provided to support their learning experience.

• Integrate Ask a Librarian services (IM, phone and email services) into courses.

• Link to Library Resources from inside SPARK and course websites.

• Link to E-Reserves and Streaming Video and Audio.

• Integrate RefWorks and RefShare (Citation management and sharing software) into online course components.

• Integrate Turnitin (Plagiarism prevention and detection software) into online course components.

For more information, visit http://www.library.umass.edu/instruction/faculty.html

Download a PDF handout of this list

Library Guides (http://guides.library.umass.edu/) are Web sites created by Subject Specialist Librarians. These sites contain links and resources which help your students do research by highlighting books, databases and other resources that are most appropriate for the topic. Once a Library Guide has been created for your course, it is possible to “embed” a small, Flash-based version of the guide on a page in SPARK or any Web site (note, the embedding code will not work in a Blog).

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