Rationale & Creation
This webpage on Canadian Confederation Resources was created to meet the learning outcomes of the UBC LIBE 465 course in my Teacher-Librarianship diploma course. I chose the topic of Canadian Confederation because I have taught the Social Studies 10 curriculum numerous times in the past and have found that students have a difficult time researching the different aspects of this fairly large topic. My hope is that this digital library proves to be of use to my teaching colleagues as well as future students.
The resources I have selected address the very specific areas of the people, the conferences, and the controversies related to Canadian Confederation. My target audience is students and teachers at the high school level. Initially, I focussed on finding accessible and dependable websites that students can use as "jumping off" points. Although I have directed them through this library to specific pages, most of the websites I have included contain information on many of the people, places, and issues discussed in the Social Studies 10 units on Confederation and nation-building. For teachers, I have included several resources that can supplement their current lesson plans, many which are available free online.
I have also made an effort to use a variety of types of resources. Although most of the resources are websites or databases, I have a love of primary sources and image banks which can be very useful for project and inquiry study. There are also videos that are short, informative and visually appealing. Understanding that many people find this part of Canadian history to be a bit dry, I chose resources that might generate discussion relevant to Canada's nationhood as it is today and how it reflects the choices and decisions made by the individuals of vision at the dawn of our country's history.
Selecting resources for this collection proved to be the quickest chore of this assignment. Once I had decided on the main headings I wanted to address in Confederation, I made a bee-line for my Social Studies 10 "bag of tricks". The websites and databases I used for the People resources are familiar friends from my classes I taught a couple of years ago. I was pleased to find a couple of new-to-me online video resources. And because I'm pretty traditional sometimes, I threw in Penney Clarke's Canada Revisited and the relevant Canada: A People's History film series. The lesson plans I included are ones that I have borrowed from to change up the activities for my own interest and to adapt for students who need a more varied approach to history and inquiry.
The Weebly system proved to be extremely user-friendly and I was able to design a organization system without too much backtracking. I had never designed a website before so having a click-and-drag system that organized so easily was a real relief.
I spent a lot of time examining MARC records in the Owls example for this assignment as well as the MARC records that the Vancouver Public Library includes in their online catalogue. I found that keeping the Saskatchewan/Manitoba cataloguing site open in a separate window on my desktop was very helpful in creating the MARC records. Once I was in the groove, I listed the resources by type and the task wasn't nearly as daunting as it appeared initially.
I chose a metadata cataloguing system with fields that seemed the most useful to the students that I was targetting. Specifically, Areas 1, 4, and 7 in the ISBD guidelines. Knowing that most of my colleagues teach an MLA system of citation, I wanted to make sure that the title, author, and publication information were the most obvious information on the page. Hyperlinking the titles to the records seemed the most intuitive navigation method. Weebly's dropdown menus are a fantastic feature and I feel that the flow of the pages under each heading was in a logical order. In The People heading, the resources are from most prominent individual to the lesser so while the Conferences are chronological and the controversies are arranged from the most general to the more specific.
Cartoon Image: http://images.clipartof.com/small/441661-Cartoon-Lost-Hiker-Using-A-Map-Poster-Art-Print.jpg
The resources I have selected address the very specific areas of the people, the conferences, and the controversies related to Canadian Confederation. My target audience is students and teachers at the high school level. Initially, I focussed on finding accessible and dependable websites that students can use as "jumping off" points. Although I have directed them through this library to specific pages, most of the websites I have included contain information on many of the people, places, and issues discussed in the Social Studies 10 units on Confederation and nation-building. For teachers, I have included several resources that can supplement their current lesson plans, many which are available free online.
I have also made an effort to use a variety of types of resources. Although most of the resources are websites or databases, I have a love of primary sources and image banks which can be very useful for project and inquiry study. There are also videos that are short, informative and visually appealing. Understanding that many people find this part of Canadian history to be a bit dry, I chose resources that might generate discussion relevant to Canada's nationhood as it is today and how it reflects the choices and decisions made by the individuals of vision at the dawn of our country's history.
Selecting resources for this collection proved to be the quickest chore of this assignment. Once I had decided on the main headings I wanted to address in Confederation, I made a bee-line for my Social Studies 10 "bag of tricks". The websites and databases I used for the People resources are familiar friends from my classes I taught a couple of years ago. I was pleased to find a couple of new-to-me online video resources. And because I'm pretty traditional sometimes, I threw in Penney Clarke's Canada Revisited and the relevant Canada: A People's History film series. The lesson plans I included are ones that I have borrowed from to change up the activities for my own interest and to adapt for students who need a more varied approach to history and inquiry.
The Weebly system proved to be extremely user-friendly and I was able to design a organization system without too much backtracking. I had never designed a website before so having a click-and-drag system that organized so easily was a real relief.
I spent a lot of time examining MARC records in the Owls example for this assignment as well as the MARC records that the Vancouver Public Library includes in their online catalogue. I found that keeping the Saskatchewan/Manitoba cataloguing site open in a separate window on my desktop was very helpful in creating the MARC records. Once I was in the groove, I listed the resources by type and the task wasn't nearly as daunting as it appeared initially.
I chose a metadata cataloguing system with fields that seemed the most useful to the students that I was targetting. Specifically, Areas 1, 4, and 7 in the ISBD guidelines. Knowing that most of my colleagues teach an MLA system of citation, I wanted to make sure that the title, author, and publication information were the most obvious information on the page. Hyperlinking the titles to the records seemed the most intuitive navigation method. Weebly's dropdown menus are a fantastic feature and I feel that the flow of the pages under each heading was in a logical order. In The People heading, the resources are from most prominent individual to the lesser so while the Conferences are chronological and the controversies are arranged from the most general to the more specific.
Cartoon Image: http://images.clipartof.com/small/441661-Cartoon-Lost-Hiker-Using-A-Map-Poster-Art-Print.jpg