Week 9 - Learning Express

Well, this week's challenge certainly goes a long way to reminding me how long it has been since I've done any standardized testing. I bit the bullet and plunged into some old SAT prep materials to try a few questions. It brought back lots of memories, and I felt almost guilty for not using a number 2 pencil. :)

I also found it to be very true to what I remember of the test in format, and I encourage that to give students as much familiarity as possible going into the situation. The nicest touch of all was the review, going through afterwords not only to get my score, but being able to go question by question to identify what I had done wrong. This is exactly the approach any preparation materials need to have to be self-guiding for a student, and happily this test showed a full accounting of what was chosen and what was correct.

In the Job Searching and Resume Building section I jumped right into the latter of the two topics and invested a little bit of time investigating how the would help guide a patron in building a resume. I'm glad to say that it seems that they really thought this through, providing not only a broad array of different format types, but also including a quick questionnaire that will help guide patrons to the style of resume that best suits their situation.  I didn't realize how in depth these tools were, and have been impressed enough that I will point a job-seeking friend of mine to this tool very soon.

I was similarly impressed when I did some searching and downloaded an ebook.  First of all, it's a fully-fledged ebook. No onerous check out systems or delays, or DRM schemes that I could tell. It was refreshing to see a 240+ page book referenced and just as easily fully accessed. The job title I was searching under was Journalistic Research, and the top hit was a book describing how to search online. The book was even framed with a plotline about a woman who's been given a business research assignment without a clue how to proceed.  Being asked for results on an unfamiliar set of search terms is something I think nearly every librarian has had to go through, and it would be easy to see a journalistic researcher being put in that same spot frequently.

Learning Express has been an even stronger resource than I had assumed, I'm quite impressed by the results I've found today, and it will certainly be a database I recommend more often!