Lesson 10 Wrap-Up

1. If I define my biggest discovery as my biggest surprise, then I would have to say that I was most surprised by NetLibrary, ArchiveGrid, CAMIO, and WorldCat. I had never used them before and didn't know what to expect, and was very very nicely surprised by what I found there.

I did have a general notion of what to expect in the other databases since I've used them before. Even so, I was still surprised by all the bells and whistles I've never taken time to explore before.

2. I have been saving the user guides and will be sharing them with teachers and students. I hope to give each teacher a set of spiral-bound guides (with the cool Puzzle Map as the cover) for their handy reference and will place several in the library and near library computers as well. I will be showing my administrator the activities included in the challenge as well as the guides in hopes of convincing him to have a schoolwide inservice so all our teachers can have the opportunity to learn about these wonderful resources and the time to use them. I will continue to provide additional instruction directly to students in the use of these databases as well. I will also continue to forward information about any future Challenges, webinars, new databases or new database features, etc., to teachers and will personally try to recruit them to participate . I will continue promoting the use of specific resources to teachers whose classroom activities lend themselves to particular databases.