Reflective Comments-Motivation and Information Literacy-SU Course 663

Learning how to creatively motivate students while teaching information literacy skills was a key component of this course. In addition, creating motivational goals and assessing such motivational techniques was addressed as well. While learning objectives are, many times, easily assessed, motivational goals are not necessarily as easy to evaluate.

Learning about how to motivate students is important so that students stay engaged and involved in their learning. Activities such as brainstorming, games and using technology are all highly motivating. Giving students choices in which project to create and presentation methods for a project helps to increase attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction (ARCS model).

The IMPACT model was also introduced in this course. This models increases information motivation through providing purpose, knowing the audience, and including appropriate and interesting content through motivational techniques. Keeping these items in mind when creating lessons plans is of the utmost importance.

Reflective Comments-Information Resources: Users and Services-SU Course 605

References service and resources were the main focus of this course. Topics also discussed included reader's advisory and reference service evaluation. Different types of reference queries and reference interviews were examined. An interview with a reference librarian and five hours of observation at a reference desk were completed and brought insight into various types reference work. A lesson plan involving reference skills was created.

Projects in this course involved extensively examining on-line and print resources. Researching these resources required analyzing aspects such as. scope, coverage, and reliability. In depth study of databases was extremely useful to me as I will be studying my school's databases, deciding whether or not to keep them and examining other available databases to see if they are a good fit for our building and its curriculum.

Readers' advisory, also a component of reference work, involves providing a patron with suitable materials appropriate to their wants and needs. There are numerous resources available both on-line and in database format to assist a librarian with this. Using such resources assists the librarian with this important task.