ICT teacher handbook/Building a personal digital library

As a 'global digital library, the Internet has information on almost every topic. This changes the way we can think of learning and the skills of learning. Skills of accessing information, organizing, evaluating information are very important. While the Internet is a continuous learning resource and there is a lot of content you can access, to make the resources useful, you need to organize it well, and have a clear unit plan on how to integrate multiple resources for teaching. While there are many tools for teaching learning, no single tool will be fully adequate for learning; we have to use a library of tools and materials.
Information can be accessed in multiple ways from the Internet and we need to know how to search for information on the Internet. Sources of information, even if freely available on the Internet, needs to be acknowledged. Resources are available in different formats on the Internet- images, videos, audio files etc. We must be aware of Internet safety while accessing images, videos and other information on the Internet. We already saw that each website is a page on the Internet and has an address. We can either copy and paste the link directly in the address bar of the browser (shown above). Another way of finding information on the Internet is through the use of a search engine.

Objectives of a personal digital library

You can build a resource library through the following :

1. identify, classify and organizing learning resources for self learning) and for the classroom
2. identify appropriate ICT resources for various learning needs - analyzing and abstracting, evaluating and problem solving
3. develop a concept map of learning outcomes and map to resources

How to access information on internet - Accessing video

1. Go to the website where the video is
2. If the video is downloadable, you will always see a download button; right click will usually give download option
3. You can search for videos on Youtube also. When you search, all videos will be listed. Right click on any link and click on "download as". # It will save in downloads folder; you can copy and paste into your folder
4. Alternately, when you search on you tube, you can right click on any link and click on "copy link location". This link can be put in text document. You cannot insert videos into a text document, so inserting the link will provide the information to play the video.

How to evaluate an Internet resource

There are a few things you must check when we look at the usefulness of the information on any website.

1. Source of the website. It is important to know about the source of the information, to get a sense of its authenticity
2. Use of multiple websites: Only one website will give us only one kind of information. Using more than one website will give multiple perspectives. We can also cross check and identify errors if any.
3. Relevance: Often when we search, we may immediately share the first page we find, with others. However, it is important to read (at least quickly) the contents of the page, to help you get a sense of the relevance of the page for your purpose. Information use is very contextual. A web page written about rainfall and crops will be different for different places. So we need to look at how it will be useful for us. Information also has to be valid for a given time. If the information is very old, we need to test for accuracy.
4. Features of a website: How useful a website is depends on how many different ways we can access the information and use it and view it. Can it be used by teachers, students, general public? The understanding of this will also help us determine how much we can use the content.

How to search for information

The second aspect of using a website relates to how we search for information. What words we use, how we phrase the question for search are all important features in deciding the quality of search results. For example try these different searches - Giraffe, Evolution and Evolution of giraffe You will notice that the pages that come up are all different. What we also need to keep in mind is who the user is, what is the use etc. How we use the search terms determines what results see and how relevant they are.

Check list for evaluating a website

The following questions should be answered to evaluate a website:

1. Whose website? (check the 'About Us' link that is usually provided on a web site to get this information)
2. What kind of web site - commercial, educational, etc. Educational sites or non-commercial sites may be more reliable, generally
3. What kind of resources? Is the information reliable - always check more than one site
4. Does it allow for a discussion? Or does it only provide one-way information
5. Does it have transaction - like e-commerce websites
6. Is it easy to navigate?
7. Free/ Paid/ Subscription
8. Copyright of the content on the site
9. Navigation - How many internal and external web links does it have.
10. How to contact the website owner/manager?

For teaching-learning resources - In addition to the above, the following points are to be considered 

1. What is the website about?
2. Is the information reliable - always check more than one website
3. Who made it?
4. What it has?
5. Is it for teachers or for children?
6. How to use in class?

Steps in creating a personal resource folder

There are several steps in creating a resource folder. The specific technology actions for each of these steps, is available under the relevant application in the Explore_an_application page

1. Make a folder on the computer by topic
2. Create a 'meta' document which will provide your thoughts on the topic and link the resources you have collected to these thoughts
3. Access relevant resources from Internet
4. Save pages, images, videos
5. Insert into document
6. Copy links of the resources you find useful, and which you would like to refer to in your document
7. Paste / insert links into document
8. Add your own comments, suggestions in the meta document, and connect the resources accessed and shared, with your ideas to create a resource document on the selected topic.
9. Format the document

Personal Digital Library

The set of resources downloaded in your folders for the given topic, along with your 'meta document' constitutes your personal digital library for the topic. You can build such libraries on any topic you are interested in, and build your own knowledge in a structured manner. Since the internet has resources on almost all topics, you have an opportunity to keep learning, that too on topics of your interest. The topic or area need not be only one of theoretical interest or only to build your knowledge. You can also work on building skills since there are likely to be videos available for helping you learn a new language, or even a skill like swimming. You can also share this personal digital library with your colleagues so that they can also benefit. When teachers share their personal digital libraries / resources from their library with their colleagues, cumulatively, it creates a resource rich environment. Try creating a personal digital library on a topic or issue you have always wanted to learn about.

Contributing to the Global Digital Library

You can register on Wikipedia. Create articles in Telugu (http://te.wikipedia.org) and add to existing articles. This will be a valuable contribution to OERs in your language. (You can also do this for Urdu, English, Hindi or any of the Indian languages) as well. You can also register on the TROER and contribute resources.