The Wizard of Apps

This week we were required to watch the video "The Wizard of Apps". This video is one created by Joyce Velenza who is a school librarian. Her video was so full of information on different resources for different ways to really use the internet and how to leave a good digital footprint. The video was done as a parody to the "Wizard of Oz" which helped keep it entertaining. The biggest takeaway was that there are endless sources that instruct how to truly utilize the internet and how to do it safely. It is also important that we spread this knowledge and teach others how to use these resources.

I relate some of this information in this video to being in highschool and being taught how to use resources such as ebscohost to research for school papers. Unfortunately the information we were given throughout high school was nothing as great as the information Joyce has to give the students of her school.

As a teacher, I would like to have time to discuss some of these resources with my students and introduce them to how to apply some of these resources. However, I fear that this will be hard but it may also depend a lot on what school district I end up in.



Since I am an elementary education major I though looking at Boolify would be benifitial to me and my future classroom. One thing I have always had problems with was knowing how to perform a good search so I thought that if using a kid friendly search engine such as http://www.boolify.org/ I could start teaching children at a younger age how to find good research information. Boolify uses the Bolean Search method and puts it in a visual representation to help you see how to form a good search. The website also offers awesome lessons on how to evaluate a website, how to use the Bolean Search method and how to refine search options. This website would be great for beginning researchers. I would really like the opprotunity to incorporate this into my elementary classroom!