Last week, I taught four library instruction sections of a EN101 Shakespeare themed course. I used the Online Shakespeare Bibligraphy and the Proquest Newspapers database in the first sessions to help the students find resources for their papers which were required to be on an adaptation of a Shakespeare play. They used Bubble, a mind-mapping software, to write about their play, and then dived into the databases. I believe that the newspaper database was potentially more useful for them than the more scholarly Shakespeare database because many of them were writing on less known movies and episodes of TV shows. In the second section, we talked about analyzing reviews. I broke the class into groups of 3-4 and they each received an example review from me. They then had to research the review to determine if it was a high enough quality to use in their paper. For the second half of class, we looked at movie review databases.
Overall, both classes went well. We had some technical difficulties accessing the work sheet, and I have learned that it is probably better to get the professor to post the work sheet before class rather than have students attempt to access a live link. We also had technical difficulties with the computers not connecting to the internet at one point, and that made the first class start off to a rocky start. However, I have learned from these experiences and I feel more prepared to teach the next class on November 7th.