Thing 17 - ELM productivity tools

I did the RSS feeds in Thing 3 with only the blogs and news sites that offered the feed buttons right there. I was lost when I was supposed to subscribe to a feed for my search in InfoTrac and couldn’t find a button. I tried just copying and pasting the URL of my search results, but Google Reader wouldn’t take it. I looked in all the help topics I could think of but never did figure out how to set up a feed that would alert me to new content in the search I did in Student Edition. Normally I like the clean interface of the Student Edition, but this time it frustrated me.

I was glad to see the task to create a webpage in EBSCO. I saw this at the CMLE meeting last fall, but didn’t remember exactly how to do it. It seemed very easy to do. I need to remember to set this up for teachers who could use it with their classes. Proquest has the same feature, too. At first my recent searches got included in the page in Proquest, but then I found how to delete them, so my next emailed results were cleaner. This would be a great boon to saving research. When you click on the articles from somewhere else, though, you still need to enter the password for EBSCO or ProQuest.

The NetLibrary task posed a larger hurdle. I had not used it for some time and didn’t have a clue what the password was any more. The instructions on 23Things on a Stick talk about a free account, but all the directions on NetLibrary mention that your librarian can hook you up. When I am the librarian, I’m stuck. I read a couple of other participants blogs to see if any offered how they did it, but didn’t gain anything that would help. I will have to investigate this at school.

I only batted .500 on this Thing. I know the tools are there, but it is a challenge for me and my students to keep access viable when they are not used often enough. Many of these tools are more appropriate for older high school students and these are the kids I no longer have much contact with as a result of budget cuts.