Tap into JCU for Research Skills

Students on Study period, can sometimes have no new work to do, or assignments to complete. To make good use of this time, refine your personal tool kit of skills.
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Practice your Pre-Reading Skills, Effective Reading or Information skills. Find new tools to use. JCU have a variety of Learning Skills booklets to help you to develop your ability to locate information, scan and skim large quantities of information or comprehend and organize new information from a variety of sources.

Work through the plethora of tools offered by our local James Cook University.  Click here.    

Try this Pre-Reading Strategy for scanning Journal Articles.  This allows you to assess quickly whether an article will be useful for your assignment, without having to read every word.

1. Read title, authors and affiliations.

2. Read the first paragraph or abstract in full.

3. Read the topic sentence of every paragraph in the body of the article.

4. Read the last paragraph or conclusions in full.

5. If the article suits your thesis/purpose, go back and read the article carefully.

While there are always explicit strategies and tools you can use to improve your skills and set you up for success, did you know that wide reading is still the best preparation for any unseen test  AND  without even trying, a love of literature will extend your neural networks in a way that watching television does not. Reading will improve your literacy levels,  general knowledge, AND make you the person, your dog thinks you are.

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Science Week and JCU Open Day

 

Last week the library combined two events; National Science Week and a promotion of the James Cook University Open Day  Aug 21.  The JCU Medical & Health Sciences Faculty Marketing Department  kindly supplied anatomical models and the Minister, Hon Cameron Dick,  visited the library on Wednesday while paying his respects to our own award-winning HOD Science, Mr Callin.  

Lots of students expressed interest in the JCU Course book for 2012 as well as our own title, “Careers in IT”.  We have two contests running until the end of August. The first is an anatomy quiz and the second involves writing a Nano Story (50 word story) mentioning one of the health science careers listed on the competition.  All our competitions this week and next week, which is book week, close at the end of August.  Snapshots of the Science Week/JCU display are sprinkled through the blog today.

Inspecting the Medical realia on loan from JCU

Sites to help you study & read

This week, we’ve added heaps of good research sites to our Library Bookmarks  like the Creative Commons website.  Search by tags or look down the lists to check if a list has been created for your assignment.  A very cool Study webpage for 13-17yr olds has just been launched by the Western Australian Government. Spend some time at STUDY VIBE and watch your grades improve.  The WA government has always been innovative, they have been running a journal featuring reviews of adolescent fiction for many years. You can  read the reviews online. Search the CMIS website for Book Reviews (search by title or author) You can even search for information pathfinders (search by topic) and be rewarded with a hotlist of websites.  This is one example of a book review which appears in the Fiction Focus quarterly journal and also in their online database. Here’s the review of “Lean on Pete”, a new novel on the shelves.

Steampunk

“Lean on Pete” is great for those of us who like realism, but hold onto your hats fantasy lovers, there’s a new genre to describe the speculative yet historical stories that are increasing in number. It’s “Steampunk”.  Explore these bookmarks from the Marcellin Library to learn more about Steampunk novels.

More visitors arrived from Hong Kong and were partnered up with eager Smithfield  students. Teachers, Ann, Petula & Ray spent some time with us in the library, while the students were off with their buddies.

Visiting students from Hong Kong using a library laptop

Bad news – Good news

Early morning study

Exam time is nearly upon us. “I love the smell of seniors on a study period in the morning “ [pictured above] as opposed to napalm. The best part about the new Nescafe laptops is not that seniors have priority (well that too) but that they are very portable, especially since our wireless network was upgraded.  If you can’t log on check that your wireless switch is on and glowing a royal blue colour. Still can’t log on? Try plugging in the blue network cable for a few minutes until you launch your desktop. Don’t forget to have it scanned back in when you are done. Still stressed?  Why not check out this Study Fact Sheet at Beyond Blue Youth?  Read some of the other fact sheets online. Some of these helpful fact sheets are archived in a folder in the Senior Study Room for you to take.

So what’s the bad news for those wanting the outside “A” on their next assignment? The bad news is we no longer subscribe to the online database company. The good news is that we have explored at least two ways to access good online journal databases for free!  Click here to read two quick step-by-step tutorials for online database access. You’ll need to become a member of the Cairns City Library for the first one. Easy – just take a bill as proof of address, to the Smithfield branch and sign up. You’ll get heaps of extra privileges for your trouble – like access to a qualified tutor in an online chat room – yourtutor – most days after 4pm.

Rupert McCall, Australian poet, was in Cairns last week to MC a sportsperson’s luncheon for charity. What a pity we had to come to school. Don’t miss his recitation of The Firefighter’s Dream, a tribute to firemen (and women) who lost their lives on 9/11, 2001. He wrote a similar elegy for Steve Irwin.

For those who missed Mrs Anderson’s display of “100 best first lines from novels” (below) follow the link to the list of books and while you’re enjoying this Word Press blog check out the other interesting “lists” in the LH sidebar. Lastly, this one’s for true library lovers …(drum roll)… check out this beautiful wedding venue .

100 Best First Lines from Novels