MLIS Discoveries

 At first daunting, the instructional presentation actually turned out to be one of my favorite group projects this semester. From the first meeting, our group was instantly engaged and all in on the topic of resume writing. We initially set our topic and each member took a sub-topic to research and present on.  Everyone came forward with really great ideas: Lorena had the brilliant idea to incorporate a game as a sort of icebreaker. Kelly came up with the catchy "3 Cs" concept for our lesson. Todd always asks great questions and even interviewed someone for professional advice. Matthew came up with a great overview and feedback scenario since we knew we'd want to learn do better in the future. Gina, with probably the most difficult task of all, took on the live demo part. Everyone pitched in and made it really fun and easy to put this presentation together.  I felt our presentation itself was really smooth. I was proud of each person's part and although I don't t...

 As of late I have been very focused on finding a new job and have found that it's a process that really needs quite a bit of focus and skill-building. Throughout my job journey I have come across a lot of great articles and resources that have helped me along the way so I thought I would create a pathfinder as a resource for job hunters.  I decided to use Padlet for my pathfinder as I found it easy to use and I really like the visual representation. Linking to the websites generates an image that can attract the user, but as the creator I also felt there was a lot of room for control by creating titles and captions to explain just how I thought these resources would be useful to folks.  I think a pathfinder such as this Padlet I have created would be a great tool for public libraries. Padlet is incredible flexible and easy to use, and as links change and resources are updated, it is very easy to update the gallery of links or change directions. I think a resource such as...

 After agonizing over the last few assignments unsure of what to do as my topic and unsure as to how to go about even getting started, I was so fearful that this project was going to be just as agonizing if not so much worse. Much to my surprise, I ended up really enjoying making this video and I think this will be a really handy tool to use in the future.  I started by signing into WeVideo, which I had never used before. Shout out to our classmate Angel for posting a quick tutorial on getting started with WeVideo, it was a great introduction and got me inspired to make an awesome video. I decided to do a quick video about accessing, signing in and basic navigation on Overdrive, which is an app I love to use. I find the web version Overdrive easier than its mobile version Libby... so I wanted to highlight this, probably now antiquated, catalog of ebooks and audiobooks.  I started by recording my screencast. It took me about 10 tries to get a take I was happy with. I didn'...

 Yet again, the process for coming up with our breakout within our group was smooth and seamless. Upon meeting to brainstorm our breakout ideas we very quickly settled on a series of games within book genres that would make recommendations to great books within that genre... kind of like a readers advisory breakout!  The challenge for me came in deciding what game to make for my part of the breakout. At the end of our first meeting we each volunteered for a genre and style of game to create... my genre was horror and my style of game was a scavenger hunt of sorts, which is a style of game I considered somewhat open to interpretation. In the first week I created and abandoned probably about six different games... none of them seemed appropriate for the adult audience we were looking to engage or became overly complicated in making recommendations.  This journey and these complications led me to the Genially program, which had a number of quiz games and other formats. I set...

As I got started on my promotional flyer process I knew I wanted to do something that was simple, yet eye-catching. After reading my feedback from my brochure, I wanted to keep things simpler for this project, with not as much writing to overwhelm the viewer.  One of the biggest challenges in getting started was picking the right template to roll with. I spent literally multiple hours just going through Canva's wide array of promotional flyer templates, trying to find one that I could work with for this project. I was excited to try a template after I got frustrated and gave up using one during the brochure project. I finally settled on a design that I thought evoked computer science and coding in a way that would be appealing for the fictional Hour of Code event I decided to host at my local public library. I found the template slightly easier to use for a flyer as there were less elements to manipulate. My resulting design was the following: Colorful Playful Trivia Event...

 I felt very inspired to work on my brochure after reviewing the assigned chapters in William's book. I enjoyed the chapters and felt well-versed in design principles, at least well-versed enough to design my own tutorial brochure... soon I was very humbled!  I used Canva for the first time on recommendation from Prof. Siegert. I found it somewhat clunky at first, but quickly adapted to its unique system of design. Being so inspired from the assigned text, I did not use a template for my brochure as I did not feel I could find any templates with enough opportunities for screenshots. My resulting brochure is somewhat plain on the outside and very busy on the inside. I tried my very best to use minimal text and to make screenshots do most of the communicating.  I think the most challenging part of this assignment was trying to limit text in favor of pictured information. I am so used to writing, and writing a lot, that it was a challenge to be succinct and let images do the...