Here are the last reports from the 2019 LILAC Spring Training. Looking forward to a great new school year with everyone!
Culturally Responsive Teaching through the Intersectionality of Collection Development and Information Literacy
Presented by Madeline Ruggiero, Queensborough Community College
Blog post by Linda Miles (Hostos Community College)
Madeline Ruggiero discussed the rationale and strategies for including exploration of materials from the library’s print collection within information literacy instruction. Over time, Madeline has been augmenting the library’s collection with student assignments and common topics in mind, topics that often reflect students’ own cultural identities. She has built print collection exploration activities into her lesson plans, including searching for, retrieving, and navigating within books to identify additional sources or related lines of inquiry. These materials enrich students’ research exploration, heighten engagement, and highlight the excellent print collection of the library.
Google Forms: Differentiating Instruction, Condensing Feedback
Presented by Danielle Apfelbaum (Farmingdale State College)
Blog post by Linda Miles
Danielle Apfelbaum presented a novel method for using Google Forms to accomplish two goals: to differentiate instruction and to manage instruction feedback data from classroom faculty. First, she takes advantage of the branching function of Google Forms, initially asking students to self-assess their knowledge or preparedness for the assignment at hand. Depending on how an individual student responds, the form then asks them to complete a developmentally appropriate hands-on task and enter a response. Student who indicate that they are totally confused by search interfaces would be given a different set of instructions than that given to students reporting a great deal of prior success using library search engines, with each set tailored to their respective level of experience.
Danielle asks students to provide their names to motivate compliance, and, as their answers are submitted via the form, she displays a spreadsheet with those responses (without names) to the class. Since many activities require students to provide URLs to resources they have found or even permalinks to search results, Danielle is able to use these to help guide class discussion.
To manage faculty feedback data, Danielle uses the “use existing spreadsheet” function in Google Forms to collate into one spreadsheet the responses to separate forms, which are each specific to a given faculty member/course section. This keeps all the data together in one place, and allows her to do some cross-section or cross-departmental analysis.
