This site has been designed to help 6-8 teachers see the acquisition of information literacy skills as a continuous process-begun in elementary school and continuing through high school.
It suggests ways to monitor the progress of the process of seeking, gathering and using information. It provides a group of lessons we have found or adapted to use in a 6-8 setting which teach a pre-determined range of skills and provides a pathway through which teachers, library media specialists and technology administrators can create their own lessons to fit their information literacy needs. We believe that providing opportunities for students to learn both traditional information-seeking skills and "digital information-seeking" skills will insure that students can find the information they need in all environments.
We fully acknowledge our indebtedness to Dr. Ruth Small and Dr. Marilyn Arnone, who are pioneering an inter-active information literacy template and whose skill sequence we used, to Dr. Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz, who have developed the Big 6, and to Doug Johnson who is breaking ground in information literacy skill development. Work on this project has been funded by the We-Learn Grant of the Living Schoolbook. We are grateful to Dr. Barbara Shelly, of Syracuse University's School of Education, and to Claudia Dunn, Mike Heroux and Sean Keesler, her website and database designers. We are grateful to Bob Bone and Linda Armstrong, who coordinated the project through the OCM Board of Cooperative Services, in Syracuse, NY, and to the three school districts who have enabled us to work on the project--all in New York: Altmar-Williamstown-Parish, Chittenango, and Skaneateles. Special thanks go to Dr. Walter Sullivan, Superintendent of Skaneateles Central School for his unfailing encouragement, Michelle Turecek, whose early work at SCS allowed us to believe that this site would be possible and to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose homepage showed us that lessons and skills could be presented in an informative yet beautiful way.Project participants have been Joyce Bishop, Dr. Paul Blair, Mary Cappelli, Tom Downes, Mary Harrigan, Glenda House, Carole Kupelian, MJ May, Charles McCabe, Sharon O'Connell and Ruth Parker.