Maps at the Library of Congress

I enjoyed the interactive map reading exercise that showed a map, more like a detailed drawing, of Washington, D.C. I have pretty good background knowledge about women's fashions and when things were built, so I found it fun to guess when it might have been made. As the ladies did not have bustles, I assumed it was before 1880. If you gave students some fun facts for background info, such as the year the Washington Monument was built, and a fashion profile by decade of the 1880s, they might have more buy-in.

Now, at home, I have a map from 1664, a page from a Dutch atlas by a mapmaker named Hondius. I am going back online to see if I can find more maps by that particular mapmaker.

Update: I did find some maps by Hondius, but most of them were listed but not visible. I tried three times to upload one to this blog, each time getting a corruption message. It uploads in this weird jp2 format that does not work. I finally made a screen shot, a TIFF that I converted to a jpg.

Making Sense of Online Text

I bet I'm not the only one in the class who downloaded and printed this article before reading it. That said, it wasn't designed for internet reading...dense text demands to be scrutinized and highlighted with a yellow marker. Am I a dinosaur for thinking this?

Back to the article. My students would enjoy being fooled by a hoax, and it would make a valuable lesson, though I think the velcro hoax is too simplistic for high school. Figure 2 is fantastic and makes its points more clearly than the Google lessons. I got that one could research the sites from the Google lessons, but this chart shows how. Great. I'm starting a persuasive essay unit next week with a research component, and I plan to make Figure 3 into a word doc that they can use.

Does anyone know if there is an easy, free, way to list links in ALA-approved formats? I heard of a site that had a yearly subscription fee, but that was two librarians ago. Forgot the name of the service. Also, does anyone have experience with the Peninsula Library System portal, the one that links to public library cards?

Callling people from class

Have you seen the "Follow" feature of these blogs? I'm "following" some of you, and that means, when I visit MY blog, a button to connect to your blog appears. It makes it fast to check in on what you are saying. Now, if you would say something, we might get some energy going.

Google Research Thoughts

It took some time with the computer and the printer. I printed up most of the lessons and took notes on the paper in addition to reading it online. I learned a bit about how to do detective work on sites using good old Google researching authors of web sites. I want to learn more in class. Can we actually see what type links a web site attracts?
Though weather, movie times, trends in web presence, stock prices, and so much more is available, I wonder how much scholarly research is being indexed, or if that' s the inaccessible web.