A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in new electronic media products for very young children, including those as young as one month old. A driving force behind this new market is the advertising and package labeling that makes claims about the educational benefits of specific products. A Teacher in the Living Room? Educational Media for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers, a new report prepared for the Kaiser Family Foundation, examines the educational claims about commercially available educational media products (videos and DVDs, computer software and video games) for very young children and what kind of research has been conducted to substantiate the educational claims. (Announcement from OCLC Abstracts v. 8 n. 51)

Journals Indexed in ERIC

You can easily access a list of journals indexed in ERIC. Please note that those journals marked with a gold star are those that are currently indexed (after the ERIC reorganization in 2004, some journals were dropped from database coverage, and many are still in the process of being contacted for inclusion in the ERIC database).

Have a journal you believe should be covered by ERIC--let them know! Click here to contact ERIC with your journal recommendations.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) unveils new website design

NCES has a new website design. Here's what they have to say about it:

"We have added our newest information to the homepage and also restructured our menus to make finding what you are looking for easier. The biggest difference is the navigation bar across the top of every page that enables you to find items of interest no matter where you are on our site.

We are also in the process of redesigning the way we present publications and survey areas. An example of the new publication template can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/.

We have also made available an RSS feed to help you keep abreast of all NCES news."

TCRecord: No Child Left Behind

The new online issue of TCRecord is devoted to No Child Left Behind, and includes articles such as The Expansion of Federal Power and the Politics of Implementing the No Child Left Behind Act and book reviews on a number of new titles relating to No Child Left Behind and its impact on education.

New Journal Subscription: Journal of School Leadership

The WSU Library System is pleased to announce a subscription to a new journal--the Journal of School Leadership. Our subscription begins with the September 2005 issue, volume 15 issue 5. (This journal is available in print only. It is not yet available online from the publisher.)

Carnegie Foundation Overhauls Its Classification System

As reported in the November 18, 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching unveiled on Thursday the most sweeping changes in more than three decades in its system of classifying American colleges and universities.

The methodology is a "fundamental reconsideration" of the foundation's approach to institutional categorization, Carnegie officials said. Five new categories of institutions will augment the single-scheme method that has been in place since 1970. Carnegie's officials said they hoped the new classifications would bring greater precision to the categorizing of more than 4,000 institutions.

The five new categories that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is adding to its classification system for colleges and universities are as follows:

Undergraduate instructional program:Classifies institutions based on the level of undergraduate degrees awarded (associate or bachelor's); the proportion of bachelor's-degree majors in the arts and sciences and in the professional fields; and the extent to which an institution awards graduate degrees in the same fields in which it awards undergraduate degrees.

Graduate instructional program:Examines the nature of graduate education, with a focus on the program mix. Classification is based on the level of graduate degrees awarded (master's, professional, or doctoral); the number of fields represented by the degrees awarded; and the mix or concentration of degrees by broad disciplinary domain. Institutions are classified according to the breadth of graduate offerings and the concentration of degrees in certain fields or combinations of fields.

Enrollment profile:Groups institutions by the mix of graduate or professional students and undergraduate students, giving an approximate measure of a student populations' "center of gravity." Such distinctions can have implications for infrastructure, services, and allocation of resources, the foundation says.

Undergraduate profile:Classifies colleges and universities with respect to the proportion of undergraduate students who attend part or full time; the achievement characteristics of first-year students (including entrance-examination scores, which correspond to the selectivity of undergraduate admissions); and the proportion of entering students who transfer from another institution. Differences in those areas inform how an institution serves its students, including issues such as student services, the scheduling of classes, extracurricular activities, and time required to get a degree, among others, the foundation says.

Size and setting:Categorizes institutions by enrollment and residential character, variables that correspond to institutional "structure, complexity, culture, finances, and other factors," the foundation says.

Test Banks available for use in Blackboard

WSU has a license for Respondus software, which can be used to develop tests, quizzes and activities that can be uploaded into your Blackboard course site. Respondus has a Test Bank Network, where you can search for Publisher test banks in Respondus format, which are available for many of the leading textbooks in higher education. Instructors who adopt a participating textbook can download the Respondus-formatted test bank using their Respondus software [see how this works].

To learn more about using Respondus, or to get a copy of the Respondus software, go to the Office for Teaching and Learning website.

State Education Data Profiles

Search for statewide information in elementary/secondary education,postsecondary education, public libraries and selected demographics forall states in the U.S. You can select up to 4 states to compare at a time.In addition to getting statewide data you will also get data on U.S.averages and the ability to dynamically graph the results. The data used for the State Education Data Profiles data tool comes from many NCES sources and has just been updatedwith 2003 public library information and 2004-05 postsecondary educationinformation.

Nations Report Card in Reading and Mathematics

National and state-by-state results of the 2005 Nation's Report Card in reading and mathematics, detailing fourth and eighth grade achievementon the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were justreleased.

Findings since the previous assessment in 2003 show:

• Fourth-grade students scored higher in both reading and mathematics.
• Eighth-graders scored higher in mathematics, but reading scoresdecreased.
• Many of the differences in achievement between Black or Hispanicstudents and their White counterparts have narrowed.
• Most states did not see a change in reading scores for 4th or 8thgraders.
• Thirty-three states and jurisdictions showed an increase in 4th-grade mathematics scores.

Summer Seminars for Teachers

The Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars are designed to strengthen participants' commitment to high quality history teaching. Public, parochial, independent school teachers, and National Park Service rangers are eligible. These weeklong seminars provide intellectual stimulation and a collaborative context for developing practical resources and strategies to take back to the classroom. Seminars are tuition-free.

In addition, seminars offer:
Stipends of $500
Books, room and board in college dormitories
In-service and new teacher credit
Deadline for Applications:Applications must be submitted by February 1, 2006. Limited to thirty participants per seminar by competitive application. Preference given to new applicants.

2005 Citations in ERIC FirstSearch database

You can now access all of the citations for 2005 recently added to the ERIC database through the library's FirstSearch interface for ERIC. The FirstSearch interface allows you to search the ERIC database, and link directly to online available full-text resources through the WSU Library System using the Get it @ WSU (Article Linker) function. Click on the article title to get to the Get it @ WSU link.

Digest of Education Statistics Released

The National Center for Education Statatics (NCES) NCES has just released the Digest of Education Statistics, 2004. Topics in the Digest include: the number of schools and colleges;teachers; enrollments; graduates; educational attainment; finances;federal funds for education; employment and income of graduates;libraries; technology; and international comparisons.

Rod Paige and former top aides organize a consulting group

This story ran in the Sunday Detroit News/Free Press, and discusses the consulting group organized by former Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige and his former top aides. It is expected this group will be retained by the Department of Education for advice. You can read the story at the Detroit Free Press web site

Hurricane Help for Schools

The U.S. Department of Education has developed the web site Hurricane Help for Schools to assist schools and students affected by Hurricane Katrina. Companies and organizations can respond to the needs of students and send resources directly to them, and schools will be able to directly contact the companies and organizations offering help.

Dept of Ed Teacher-To-Teacher Initiative

The Teacher-to-Teacher Initiative site links e-learning digital professional development workshops on teaching methods, links to the 2004 Teacher-to-Teacher workshops, and information on the Teacher-to-Teacher Training Corps.

US Dept of Education Forecast of Funding

"The US Department of Education Forecast of Funding lists virtually all programs and competitions under which the Dept. of Education has invited or expects to invite applications for new awards and provides actual or estimated deadline dates for the transmittal of applications under these programs. The lists are in the form of charts--organized according to the program offices and include previously announced programs, as well as those planned for announcement at a later date." Announcement from AFT Michigan magazine

ERIC Adds New Content for New School Year

ERIC has announced the availability of a substantial amount of new 2004 and 2005 content. Highlights of this content addition include more than 10,000 bibliographic journal records from more than 300 current journals and over 1000 ERIC documents (most documents are available in full text). ERIC has also included more than 9000 journal records that have been acquired, but only partially processed. You can identify a partial record by the yellow tag indicating "In Progress" under the title in the search results. Note that the "In Progress" records are only available through the ERIC website. These records should be available through the WSU ERIC databases (FirstSearch and CSA) very soon.

Technology Source Archives

The Technology Source Archives are now available at www.technologysource.org. This journal focused on using information technology tools to enhance education, and was published from by Microsoft (1997-1998), then by UNC-Chapel Hill (1998-2001), and finally by the Michigan Virtual University (2001-2003). It was taken offline by the Michigan Virtual University in April, 2005.

A very similar journal, Innovate, is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed online periodical currently published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and governmental settings. Our basic assumption is that innovative uses of technology in one sector can inform innovative uses of technology in each of the other sectors.

Both journals are available by freely and you can link to them directly or through the WSU Library Catalog.

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to WSU! The WSU Library System has an exciting new website that we hope both you and your students will find easier to navigate. To get to a database, just click on the letter the database title starts with (like E for ERIC) directly under the Articles & Databases link. Click right on Articles & Databases to get to a database page specifically designed for Education. And mouse over the For Faculty tab to bring up a page with links to resources like our NEW ACQUISITIONS list and Media Services request page.

Literature and the Child Conference

Thursday, Sept. 29 at the Library of Michigan, Lansing
Featured speaker Russell Freedman begins this all day conference with his speech, “Bring ‘em Back Alive – Writing Non-fiction and Biography for Young People”. The day concludes with Sandra Hansen's storytelling, bringing historic characters to life. Click here for registration information.

2 Research Groups in Social Science Research Merging

From an article in Today's News, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 16, 2005

The Campbell Collaboration, an international organization that analyzes the quality of social-science research, is joining forces with the American Institutes for Research, the American Institutes announced on Monday. The Campbell Collaboration, founded in 2000, provides information about the effects of policy in such areas as education and crime.

The two groups already collaborate on the "What Works Clearinghouse," an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education that reviews studies of the effectiveness of educational programs and policies.

Link to Campbell Collaboration
Link to American Institutes for Research
Link to What Works Clearinghouse

Educating Migrant Children

Yesterday, NPR ran the following story: "The U.S. Department of Education is developing new methods to track the children of migrant workers. School records can take weeks or months to catch up with migrant students, costing them valuable education time. The new system would streamline record keeping."

Click here to listen to this story.

Digital Futures programs at the PK Library

Earlier this year, CSPAN televised "The Digital Future", a series of eight discussions hosted by the Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, which examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified. This series is being shown in the Purdy/Kresge Library on Wednesdays through the months of July and August. Titles of each segment, times and locations follow. For more information on the segment's contents, click here.

7/20 Universal Access to Knowledge, Kresge Auditorium
7/27 Quantum Computing, Kresge Auditorium
8/3 And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All? Purdy Simons Room
8/10 The Experience of Reading, Purdy Simons Room
8/17 Copyright Issues, Kresge Auditorium
8/24 Distribution of Knowledge, Kresge Auditorium
8/31 New Internet Concept: From the Library of Information to the Library of Things, KresgeAuditorium

New Online Tutorial for EndNote

Nandita Mani, a librarian at WSU's Shiffman Medical Library, has developed an online tutorial that introduces new users to EndNote. The tutorial takes about 25 minutes. Please take a look, and feel free to link this tutorial in your Blackboard site for your students.

http://www.lib.wayne.edu/shiffman/tutorials/endnote/index.html

ERIC "Documents" online submission form being tested

When ERIC eliminated the clearinghouses last year, they also eliminated the ERIC Document system. They are reinstituting a form of non-journal submission and publication for inclusion in the ERIC database. Following is the announcement from ERIC.

"ERIC is pleased to announce the availability of the Open Online Submission System (Beta) on the ERIC Web site. This system enables individual contributors to submit non-journal materials that will be considered for inclusion in the ERIC database. In order to continue the high quality, education focus of ERIC the submitted materials will be evaluated against the Screening Critera. As part of the Beta system, there is no established selection or processing turnaround time."

The web version of ERIC is available at www.eric.ed.gov

E-mail alerts for Current Publications in Education

Our database vendors are offering new services all the time. Did you know that you can set up an account in many of our databases, and save searches, and receive e-mail alerts of current publications and new articles published related to your saved searches?

These are generally called Alerting Services and here is just a sample of the databases that provide them:

ERIC, Physical Education Index and Sociological Abstracts through the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts interface

PsycINFO, Papers First, Wilson Select Plus, RILM Music Abstracts through the FirstSearch interface.

Health and Psychosocial Instruments, PsycARTICLES through the OVID interace.

ISI Web of Science allows all this plus citation alerts--you could get an alert when your article is cited in a journal indexed by ISI.

Plus--get table of contents alerts from a selection over 1,000 journals in ProjectMuse and ScienceDirect.

If you would like to make an appointment to set-up your own alerting services, give me a call at 313-577-4217 or send me an e-mail at ag6887@wayne.edu

SPOTLIGHT ON: Foreign Language teaching resources

Websites:
There are some very useful free websites available with excellent resources on foreign language teaching. Here are my top 3 picks:

Foreign Language Resources http://library.rwu.edu/subjectguides/foreignlang.html
This web guide from Roger Williams University Library links you to freely available sites in six european languages, plus additional links to comprehensive websites with activities and language guides.

iLove Languages http://www.ilovelanguages.com
A comprehensive catalog of language-related Internet resources. The more than 2400 links at iLoveLanguages have been hand-reviewed to bring you the best language links the Web has to offer. Whether you're looking for online language lessons, translating dictionaries, native literature, translation services, software, language schools, or just a little information on a language you've heard about, iLoveLanguages probably has something to suit your needs. (website description). iLove Languages is the latest revision of the former Human-Languages Page and the Languages catalog of the WWW Virtual Library.

Ethnologue www.ethnologue.com
Ethnologue is owned by SIL International, a service organization that works with people who speak the world’s lesser-known languages. Its extensive searchable bibliography is a great place to find books on language for over 100 countries around the world. There is also an excellent country index.

New Print Books in the WSU Libriaries:
Dialogue with Bakhtin on second and foreign language learning : new perspectives / edited by Joan Kelly Hall, Gergana Vitanova, Ludmila Marchenkova. Purdy-Kresge Library P5 1 .H288 2005 http://elibrary.wayne.edu/record=b2936410

Connecting reading and writing in second language writing instruction / Alan Hirvela. Adamany Undergraduate Library P 53.27 .H57 2004

The writing lab approach to language instruction and intervention / Nickola Wolf Nelson, Christine M. Bahr, and Adelia M. Van Meter. Purdy-Kresge Library P 53.27 .N45 2004

New Electronic Books available through the WSU Library Catalog:
Before you access this book, you will need to download an ebrary reader. Go to http://site.ebrary.com/lib/anysite/Download

Designing authenticity into language learning materials / Freda Mishan.

New Online Videos:
To access, just do a title search in the WSU Library Catalog. Click the link under Click the link(s) below to connect. Scroll down on the page to the video titles. Click the small gold VoD icon to the right of the title. You will need to go through the FREE sign-up with your e-mail address and a password YOU select (please remember this password, the WSU library system does not maintain them). You can then view the video.

Teaching foreign languages K-12 workshop: Connecting Standards, Research and Practice. Episodes 1-8 / produced by WGBH Boston in association with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Teaching foreign languages K-12 : a library of classroom practices Episodes 1-30 / produced by WGBH Boston in association with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Using Google Scholar to link to WSU Full-Text Resources

Want to try something really amazing?

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you can install an OpenURL resolver that will link the citations from a Google Scholar search directly to WSU's SFX (and the full-text, if available).

Here's how.

First, you have to install the Mozilla Firefox browser on your system: http://www.mozilla.org/

Once you have installed Mozilla, open it and go to the Openly Informatics and download the OpenURL Referrer: http://www.openly.com/openurlref/

Now, you will need to set up the preferences (Linking Information) in the OpenURL Referrer Preferences box that comes up after you install, close Firefox and reopen.

Select the NEW PROFILE button and type in WSU as the profile name and click OK

Put the following in the Link Server Base URL box http://openurl.lib.wayne.edu:9003/sfx_local

Select OpenURL version 0.1

Select the Text button and type in WSU

Click OK

Now, go back to the Mozilla Firefox browser, go to http://scholar.google.com/

Type in a sample search. Try this one: "professional development" and teachers and leadership

You will see some of the citations have a bold WSU after the source citation. Click the WSU--SURPRISE!!

Educational Researcher journal available online.

Educational Researcher is now available online from Volume 30, Issue1 (2001) through present issues. It contains scholarly articles that come from a wide range of disciplines and are of general significance to the educational research community. Click here to view this journal: http://elibrary.wayne.edu/record=b2570104a

You can access by doing a journal title search in the WSU Library Catalog or by using the Online Journals E-Journal finder, linked through the WSU Library System homepage. http://www.lib.wayne.edu/resources/journals/index.php