Effective way to teach about databases?

[Rochelle Garfinkel]

I've been a middle/high school librarian for 3 years now, and have come up with good, effective, interactive ways to teach quite a few things. However, I have yet to figure out a good way to teach the concept of what databases are...how they are different, when/why students (and teachers) might want to use them. Has anyone come up with a good way to do this? In a few weeks I will be teaching an in-service to faculty and I'd love to teach them about databases so they might begin to encourage their students to use the many databases we have access to both for the school and through our regional consortium. Links, documents, anything people are willing to share would be appreciated!

[Jennifer Fasolino]

Last year, I taught a database lesson using one of the printouts from Joyce Valenza's PowerTools (learning from the master). It was the database evaluation sheet, I think. I was working with a history class, and we had three separate databses to cover, so I broke the class into three groups and had each group take one database. After they evaluated the database, they got up and taught the other groups about their database. I tweaked the evaluation sheet a bit to address the issues of the assignment, but basically the class evaluated the appearance, content, applicability to assignment, pros/cons, etc of the databases. By the end of the two day lesson, each student had a stong working knowledge of one database, and a clear understanding of the two other databases as described by their classmates. It went pretty well.

[L Samuels]

I agree that it is hard to conceptualize why they should go to the databases first when they don't understand what it is. My simple explanation to the kids and staff compares it to a filing cabinet. The company has done the step of locating excellent resources and materials and put it in a filing cabinet for the user's convenience. Some companies even take it further and break the information into mini filing cabinets so you can search just the science or history database. This saves us time by bringing us the best resources first. Improves our understanding of subject matter as we have accurate information on the topic. This explanation seems to be working for us.

One other step we are taking is to create pathfinders that include the databases available through school and the public library. For the teachers benefit as well as the students, we also typically include why these count as print information even though it is an electronic format. We show a print copy of the book and our electronic copy. We discuss how the electronic version allows greater access to the information. This has helped our teachers that require print material to understand why the database should not considered under the same guidelines as random google searched websites.

Thanks for the question and I love the mini database group idea from Jennifer.