Competency #7 Image

I wanted to find an image that told of the need for access in libraries for individuals with disabilites. After completing the ACS and Lexis tutorials I set about looking for in ACS and found it immediately. It had coincidently was included in an article that I had looked at for the previous competency. The search words that I used where "library" and "disabled" and "technology." Copyright Information: http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=Perm

Competency 6-Citation Pearl Strategy using WorldCat

I started off by truncating the words accessibility, disability and library. See below



This yielded me 5,393 results of which I picked the following article "Serving the disabled : a how-to-do-it manual for librarians" By Kieth C Wright; Judith F Davie
from this article I "grew the pearl". First I clicked on the article looking at the detailed record, then I looked at the descriptors for the article. The descriptors can be seen below.



I opted to click on the first descriptor "Libraries and people with disabilites-Handbook, Manuals etc." By doing this the records where narrowed down to 36 with 34 in English.



I then clicked on the "Searching" tab and deleted the phrases "Handbooks, manuals, etc." I then inserted the words "libraries" and "disabled" and hit search.



This narrowed my search down to 23 articles or pearls that are very usefull.

Competency 6: Successive Fractions Strategy using Academic Search Complete.

Based on the hits by results I obtained from Project Muse; I decided to carry the successive fractions in the following order
•s1) libraries
•s2)accessibility
•s3 )disabled

Searching with the term "libraries or library" resulted in 448,997 hits.



Searching with the first and second facet (libraries or library) and (accessibility or access) resulted in 10, 134.



When I saw that the number of hits was very large I decided to add the last facet. So my search went like this (libraries or library) and (accessibility or access) and (disabled or handicap) which resulted in 62 hits.



Of these 62 hits; I found the following article “Accessibility in K-12 Education” useful for the purpose of my blog.

Competency 6: Specific Facet First Strategy in Project Muse database

Facet: accessibility or access Results: 34,535 (too many search results not relevant to my search topic EX. accessibility of birth control medicines in India)

Facet: library or libraries Results: 63, 419 (described all types of library history to records of book mobiles in U.S, not what I was looking for)

Facet: disabled or handicap Results: 3,591 (Interesting but not useful)

Since searching for a specific facet by itself did not yield me any results that I could immediately pick out; I had to resort to using the building block strategy to get a useful result. I then attempted the following search " (accessiblity or access)and (libraries or library) and (disabled and handicap)" this narrowed down the results to 34. See image above.

Looking over the hits I found a very interesting article by Todd Lekan titled _Disabilities and Educational Opportunity: A Deweyan Approach that speaks about students with disabilities and the classroom. This article could serve as a great starting point for an issues paper.

Competency 6: Building Block Strategy using ERIC Database

My question “How do people with disabilities access technology in libraries? “
S1= disabled or handicap
S2= accessibility or access
S3= libraries or library

1st Attempt (disabled or handicap) and (accessibility or access) and (libraries and library)
I did limit the search to full text articles; the first search listed 145 results a majority of which would prove useful to me. The article titled caught my eye.”Everyone's Invited: Ways to Make Your Library More Welcoming to Children with Special Needs” by Wojahn, Rebecca Hogue. This article fits nicely into the topic of my blog. See screenshot above.

Competency #5 Tagging/Indexing

Library Thing Tags:assessment (1) Curriculum Resources (1) education (1) in 371 mil (1) language arts (1) reading (1) Reproducible (1) RESERVE Special Needs (1) VK Professional Library (1) wishlist (1)

Library Thing Link: http://www.librarything.com/work/1200688

This book was picked for it offers techniques that teachers can use to help students with reading disabilities. This book has a high number of tags for the main focus of my blog and the requirements of this competency assignment. While the usefulness of this book is great for classroom teachers; it does not ideally fit all of the criteria I would have liked for the public school librarian serving students with disabilities. Therefore I recommend that my followers looks a the following book: "Assitive Technology: An Introductory Guide for K-12 Library Media Specialists" By Janet Hopkins. This book only has the tags I have listed on it and has unfortunately not been highly read on Library Thing, hence why it has no tag clouds.

Library Think Link: http://www.librarything.com/work/book/56862243

Competency # 4 RSS Feed

The RSS feeds that I chose for my blog are "ilearntechnology.com" and "teachingall.blogspot" both provide new innovative ideas that classroom teachers can use to engage students of all ability levels in reading. While I found that the "teachignall. blogspot" had more in the means of assistive technology and reading the other site "ilearntechnology.com" matched well with it on my blog. I believe that having both RSS feeds will be a great find to those teachers or librarians who one day might need the resources such as the ones I have on my blog.

Competency # 3 Podcast

The International Reading Association is a not-for-profit organization with more than 70,000 members, founded in 1956; the association “supports literacy professionals through a wide range of resources, advocacy efforts, volunteerism, and professional development activities.” (Website-About Us Section) This site pertains to my blog, because it supports and educates the reading teachers who provide literacy to students with disabilities, etc. Their podcast section has different ideas and professional advice for the subject and grade level the teacher is working with. This site brings innovative approaches to the classroom, to support struggling readers. I found this site by searching Google with keywords such as "reading strategies podcasts" or "reading skills podcasts," without quotation marks. I subscribed to several podcasts along the way.

http://www.reading.org/General/Publications/Podcasts.aspx

Competency #2 Related Blog

It is not as easy as I imagine to find a blog that both educates teachers and promotes inclusive techniques in reading and learning for their students. I believe that this is because although librarians and special education teachers work together, their roles are always thought of as seperate. The school librarian is rarely thought ever to be a source for the kind of information that informs the struggling reader and opens teachers' eyes to new technology. Since I want to be that type of librarian in the public school setting, I found the following blog and I identify with it.

http://thankyourteachers.blogspot.com/2010/01/integration-of-learning-disabled.html


One post dated February 2, 2009, titled "Integration of Special Education Students" caught my eye.


"Many teachers are unaware of the special needs of special students. Many have personal biases that confound their abilities to teach those less intellectually abled." (Jilks)

The author of this blog like myself believes that more can be done to teach students with different reading abilities.

1a. Introduction

This blog was created to fullfill the requirements to complete Information Storage and Retrieval LS 5013-20 and to make a virtual record of my learning. I am interested in working in a public school library where resources (assitive technology, book series etc) are available that permit struggling readers (ex. learning disabilites) to improve reading success.