Ready for some brief and free professional development? Try the webinars that are archived in Credo’s InfoLIt Learning Community. Each one is an hour long and presents an expert or group of experts on some aspect of information literacy. Some of the offerings focus on best practices and tips regarding Credo’s learning tools, but many others highlight pedagogical practices, successful IL programs, and ways of reaching students and faculty with your IL work. The webinars are available at the Webinars and Events section of the community, with some recent programs including:

by Beth Black and Raymond Pun

Last week Beth and Ray offered activities and suggestions for teaching students about research questions criteria and the role of background information when starting their research projects. This week the two take a look at writing and revising research questions using Credo Online Reference Service.

By Stacy R. Williams and Raymond Pun

Visual literacy is an important skill to make sense of images and multimedia content. In this post we’ll build off our previous discussion of teaching visual literacy to delve deeper into how we can engage students to think critically in this area. From social media to digital collections in museums, librarian Stacy R. Williams shares her favorite tools when teaching critical visual literacy concepts in research workshops at the University of Southern California (USC).

By Beth Black and Raymond Pun

Research question formation and background research are important parts of the process that set students up for success in seeing their assignments to completion. Credo Online Reference Service is a good tool for giving students practice with these fundamental steps during library instruction sessions. This 2-part series will describe an FYE workshop Beth designed and offered at Ohio State University for honors students. It can be easily adapted to class visits to courses in which students will have a research assignment. The workshop is part of the common read program, and is titled “What’s in a Question? Research Questions and [common read title]”. Make sure students have access to computers or tablets so they can use Credo during the session.

By A.J. Muhammad and Raymond Pun

Today there are opportunities to integrate information literacy into interdisciplinary fields such as Ethnic Studies including African American Studies. According to the Encyclopedia of the World of Sociology, “African American Studies is an academic discipline that focuses on the cultural, political, economic, religious, and social development of black Americans. First established in American universities in the late 1960s, African American Studies Departments were, in part, the product of student protests and the social climate created by the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement.” In this interview, Librarian A.J. Muhammad shares his experiences incorporating research and information literacy skills into his work at The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center For Research Black Culture.

Particularly if you’re in a public library, the material you use to teach information literacy to patrons has to work for those with different IL levels and needs. The following are examples of materials you can use to check different age-level boxes. Remember too that other items you find can often be tweaked to suit your patron population; part of the skill involved in IL work is adapting the resources you find to match local needs.

Looking to up your library's social media game? One of the best ways to engage followers to is to provide a consistent stream of fun/useful content. Understanding that libraries don't always have the time to generate all of the content they'd like, we're here to help! 

By Grace Liu and Raymond Pun

Supporting business and economic research can be quite challenging, but also fascinating. From globalization data to local company profiles, information literacy instruction can be integrated into business and economic research. In this interview, librarian Grace Liu shares her thoughts on teaching information literacy in these fields at the University of Maine, and how she utilizes the ACRL Framework and its resources to support her teaching practices and lesson plans.

Credo has developed a new LibGuide that can help introduce our Instruct product to your faculty. The guide discusses why information literacy is important and how Instruct can help improve student performance without taking away valuable class time. Please feel free to copy our LibGuide and customize it—the spots where you should add links to your institution’s subscription are highlighted in red.

By Jennifer Shimada and Raymond Pun

There has been a long practice in teaching information literacy in various areas of education studies such as P-12 focus, counseling, special education, curriculum studies, educational leadership and policy, and so forth. In addition, many graduate programs in education are offered remotely, where students and faculty are part of a distance learning community. How can librarians support graduate studies in education and distance services? In this interview, Librarian Jennifer Shimada shares some tips and resources from her role supporting online learning programs and instructional services at Relay Graduate School of Education.