Digital Content Creation Tools: FalconGuides
This year the Salisbury High School library adopted a new virtual platform, FalconGuides. During the 2012-2013 school year Salisbury High School participated as a trial school library in collaboration with the Commonwealth Libraries to study the effectiveness of digital curation tools. This study allowed both the Commonwealth Libraries and Salisbury High School to utilize LibGuides as a platform to distribute content and streamline all digital materials. Salisbury High School had the second most visited guide in the entire state. This was in large part due to increased collaboration and streamlining where students could access information for all types of research projects. The guides, now branded FalconGuides, are a single point of access that allows visitors to quickly search through subscription databases, eBooks, recommended websites, and print materials.
The first two months of the school year Robin Burns, high school library media teacher, has worked with teachers across multiple disciplines to create guides for specific research projects, classroom discussion, and school wide initiatives such as the Graduation Project. Recently the family and consumer science classes, health classes, and 10th grade English classes have all used this new platform to conduct research projects and extend the libraries resources outside of the physical facility and school day.
The candid photos below show students engaging in collaborative multi-media presentations using resources from FalconGuides. Students used NoodleTools to create their works cited bibliographies, Gale Biography in Context and Gale Literature Resource Center to gather information on their selected author and piece of literature, and the Associate Press (AP) Images database to integrate copyright friendly visual images into their projects.
