Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Study Tips and Resources


Study Tips and Resources from the Library Learning Center

  
 IMG00250.JPG
(Please note that the tips below are simply suggestions.  Tutoring support might be necessary if practiced advice does not prove useful. Continue to consult your professors for feedback throughout the semester.)
1. Read your assigned chapters and then create your own test questions. Have a classmate “grade” or evaluate your answers.
2. Use mass transit wisely.  While traveling, read your textbook or compose a first draft. 
3. Do not turn in your first written draft. After writing it, print it and read the hard copy. Go back and make corrections. Read your paper out loud.  Edit the paper again.
4. Partner with your professors during their office hours.  Work on exercises together to tighten your skills or knowledge of the subject area.
5. Use your time wisely in the Library. If the Internet is distracting, use a computer free table to do your work.

CW Library Kindle Books: Study Skills
How to Become a Straight A StudentNewport, Cal
Confessions of a Public SpeakerBerkun, Scott
Test Success!: How to Be Calm, Confident & Focused on Any TestBernstein, Ben
Math Better Explained: Learn to Unlock Your Math IntuitionAzad, Kalid
How to Get Out of Your Own WayGibson, Tyrese

Friday, September 20, 2013

Validation Sticker Information

This fall, Validation stickers are orange for Day Students  and yellow for Fall I Adult Students.  If you are a registered student, and you do not have a validation sticker on your ID, please stop by the Library or see the Security Desk.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Text a CW Librarian This Fall!


The librarians at the Library Learning Center (LLC) will be available by text this fall.  Your text messages will be anonymous, as we will not see your actual cell phone number.  We will be cooperating with other New York college and university libraries so you will be able to text a question at any time.  If you have any questions, please contact the LLC at 914-831-0280.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Are You an Evening Student Interested in Working in the Library?

If you are an evening student who is interested in working for the Library Learning Center (LLC), we hire students under the Work Study program.  Please prepare a resume and submit it to cdefaber@cw.edu.  If you have any questions, please contact the Library at 914-831-0280.


Thursday, August 1, 2013

New on CW Library Kindles


Borrow our Kindles and recommend a title!




          Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead










Career Manual- Know Yourself: A Proven Formula to Discover the Work You Love







The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change







The Little Black Dress Code Book








Office Politics: What They Will Never Tell You








Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Interview with i3 Scholar, Emely Rodriguez


Emely Rodriguez '13

CW is proud to have another i3 scholar, Emely Rodriguez. This summer, she spent all of June in Pittsburgh, PA at the University of Pittsburgh's iSchool Inclusion Institute of Information Sciences. Having just met her team, her team research project is only getting started. She will spend the rest of the year researching and putting the project together with her team long-distance in order to get it ready for next June, when the entire 2013 Cohort will return to Pittsburgh for a two week program. During that program, Emely and her team will present their year-long project. I spoke with Emely to learn more about her i3 experience and her plans for the future.

Olivia: How much did you know about the program and why did you decide to do it? What was the selection process like?
Emely: I didn’t know anything at all, honestly. It was presented to me by my former boss. He recommended me and so did my English professor. I didn’t even know Information Science existed at first. I went because it was a new experience and I know that there was something I wanted to learn beyond what I was learning here. So, I thought it was going to be a good opportunity to get out for the first time and travel and learn something that I’ve never heard of before. I went there with an open mind, didn’t expect anything, because it was my first time leaving the state without my parents and I never really took an opportunity like this to go out of the state for something academic. 

Olivia: What was the day-to-day schedule? Where some of the other student from?
Emely: Every other day, we would wake up early enough for breakfast at 9 and, from usually 10:30 to 4, we would have a speaker and they would give a presentation about either social media or technology or the environment. We would have activities as well for about an hour or two. Also every other day, we would have lunch provided for us. After 4 or 5 we would have time to ourselves. There was one strip that’s very famous for Pittsburgh students, so we tried to explore every store that was on that strip. It was really exciting because there was a lot of food that I’ve never seen in New York. A lot of the other students were from North Carolina and I met some students from Ohio. There were 2 other new Yorkers, some from Jersey, Connecticut, and I think one of them is from California.

Olivia: Can you describe the project you will be working on and your team?
Emely: We chose an environmental project- we wanted to do something to go green. We got to group up with whatever advisor we wanted to work with and it would be usually a group of 4, but we were lucky enough to have a group of 5 because we have a set of twins in our group. Basically, we want to find a method so that we can make big companies, like McDonald’s and Subway, more environmentally friendly because we noticed that a lot of their companies don’t help the environment as much as we need it to be helped. We were hoping that with the small step that we do, we can provide them with a method of being eco-friendly. They can become more helpful to the environment and we can have a more sustainable place to live. Actually, one of the girls from my group is from Puerto Rico, but luckily we’re all in the same time zone so communication isn’t as hard. It’s only hard when there are events that are happening in their lives that they can’t communicate with us, but we have Google Hangout and we do mostly everything on Google. There’s a program online called Asana and that’s a task manager or project manager, I believe, and we talk through there. We downloaded an app, GroupMe, and we text through there as a group. Right now, my computer crashed so I’m having trouble there. Aside from that, my phone has a front camera so hopefully I can work through there, but it’ll be a little difficult because I don’t have the actual documents on my laptop. We’re hoping that we can find a way to all group up in one location, hopefully Spring Break we can all go to Puerto Rico and have a little mini i3 getaway and work on our project.

Olivia: I know that you just graduated in May, so what are you plans for after CW?
Emely:  In the i3 program, many schools came to explain their graduate programs and I really fell in love with Carnegie Mellon. Hopefully, I can get a scholarship or work through something there and get my Masters. As a group, we also want to work on going to the iConference, so we want to get our project published so we can present it at the conference, which will be in California next year. This year it’s in Germany. [The schools] were talking about information management systems, which sounds pretty cool, but I’m not completely sure yet what I want to do. The field that I really want to get into and information science… I don’t really see the bridge yet, but I’m hoping that little by little it becomes more clear to me.

Olivia: What was the most interesting thing you learned from this experience?
Emely: To not be afraid of people. I honestly had a little meltdown over there because it was the first time that I broke out of my shell, I guess. We had a debate and I couldn’t handle the pressure. Little by little, I learned to notice that it’s not bad and it’s a learning experience and people don’t bite! So it was really really nice. The people were very warm and welcoming. They weren’t judgmental at all, which is the first thing people think when they’re going to go present. I was really thankful that the people I got to experience this with were so nice and friendly. But I was able to present eventually, so I lost that little fear I had that day!


Interviewed by Olivia Rosenberg

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Interview with i3 Scholar, Ryan Pink


CW student, Ryan Pink, is an i3 Scholar at the iSchool Inclusion Institute of Information Sciences. In 2012, he spent the month of June in Pennsylvania with 18 other college students from across the country. They were broken up into five different teams to work on separate Team Research Projects and, since returning home after his month in Pennsylvania, Ryan has been working all year with his team long distance to complete their project. This Sunday, he’ll be returning to Pennsylvania for a two week program where all five teams will finally get to present their projects. I sat down with Ryan to get some more information about his experience as an i3 Scholar.


Olivia: You’ve been working on a project since last June that examines the relationship between social media and politics. Can you talk a little more about this project?
Ryan: What we’re doing is monitoring Twitter tweets with their hashtags and analyzing the traffic at times during the elections to see how it can be used more efficiently. We’re trying to see the engagement at that time using social media, which is why we chose Twitter as our main engine. We actually came up with the topic through brainstorming. We all threw out ideas, mostly consisting of media and then one person said something about politics and then another person said something about the elections, so we just put all those ideas together and came up with monitoring Twitter engagement during the political elections. That’s how it came about.
My specific role was trying to monitor the Twitter engagement. We found that doing that was kind of tedious and difficult, so we ended up actually asking for grant money to buy some tweets from Twitter. From that, I think we had to analyze ten thousand tweets, or even more, and I was assigned 5,000 tweets to see how often an individual tweeted during that time. We had to go through them by hand because sometimes Excel messed up the data. The final project we’re presenting is a PowerPoint, an oral presentation, and a poster we have to include with the data and the percentage engaged during that time.

Olivia: This project has been a group effort between you and four other students from across the country. What have you learned about working as part of a team?
Ryan: Time management is definitely one. A group member that’s from NY and others from different states in different time zones- we had to pick a certain time to come together, so I believe that time management is a certain component of that. Even at 12 o’clock when we had meetings, I had 8 o’clock class that same day. It’s really difficult trying to keep together with my schoolwork. Also, flexibility and leadership- oftentimes we had assigned leaders to each section, so I gained some leadership qualities and skills during that time. We communicated with each other through Skype and Facebook. We chose our team name, Team Time Zone Scholars, because we’re all from different time zones, all an hour away from each other.

Olivia: How did this experience affect your plans for after graduation? Do you think you’ll go on to graduate school?
Ryan: Yeah, I believe so because the economy is rough. I don’t think you could easily make it with just a bachelors. The benefits that they’re offering just because I’m in the i3 program, the colleges that will offer me scholarships, are great opportunities. The fields that they explain to you about information science are great and broaden your opportunities to get a better job. You’re not just limited. You’re expanding your, I guess you could call it your repertoire.

Olivia: What will these next two weeks look like for you?
Ryan: These two weeks will probably be difficult because some of my team members won’t be there for the first week. Some of them are actually coming on the weekend that we’re presenting, so I’m really not too sure how that’s going to go. But the first week we’re there, we have to create the poster with all the data and the disparity between the young people and the older people during that time. We really didn’t get a schedule for what we’ll be doing, but I know from the previous year that that’s what they did. After the workshop, around 3 or 5 o’clock, you get free time.

Olivia: What was the most interesting thing you learned, both from the team research project itself and from the i3 experience as a whole?
Ryan: What did I learn from the project? That a lot of people tweet! You would never think that a lot of young people actually tweeted about the presidential election and that it played a major factor in their lives. What I gained from the project isn’t really anything that I didn’t learn here, because everything I learned here was actually put in towards the project. The class I’m taking now is Business Process Analysis where we have to list out the steps of how to get from plan A to plan B. In the marketing class that I took, I wrote a paper on how I would market something. Excel played a major part and PowerPoint is really going to play a major part in my next upcoming steps. So really everything that CW’s been teaching me so far was expressed in my project and in the way I handled the project situation- the efficiency of it. But what I really gained from this experience and this trip is that when I first arrived I was kind of scared. Being a student from a small private college going up against all these other students from major universities, I didn’t know what to expect- if they’re smarter than me or if I’m not capable of what they can do- but at the end of the day and during my experience there, I realized that none of these students are really different from me. I realized that if I put my mind to it, I could compete on the same level as them. This project really showed me something I never knew about myself, because before I was very quiet, but after this whole experience, I came back a very outspoken person with the confidence of not being afraid to fail and to also accept new challenges. I really grew.

In an earlier piece he wrote about his experience, Ryan said “My advice to my fellow students is to not hesitate on something that will benefit you for the future.”

Interviewed by Olivia Rosenberg

Are you looking for help preparing for the GRE?


The library has several books to help guide you through the process of studying for the GRE. With general information, practice exams, and tips for studying and testing, these books will prepare you for the GRE so you can walk into the test confident and ready to get your best score possible!




ETS: The Official Guide to the GRE

This GRE guide is created by the same company that makes the exam. It includes:  2 full length practice tests, 2 computer-based practice tests, answers with explanations,test taking strategies, and general information about the exam.






GRE for Dummies

This guide includes:  a checklist for test day, a breakdown of all question types, 5 practice tests, detailed explanations of answers, 400 vocabulary words, and information about signing up for the test.






Cracking the GRE: Proven Techniques for a Higher Score

In this book from the Princeton Review, you'll find:  4 practice tests with answers and explanations, advice on "how to crack" each exam section, multiple practice sets and drills, and access to online video tutorials.





GRE: Strategies, Practice, And Review

With this book, Kaplan provides:  over 450 questions with answers and explanations, 2 practice tests, tips to on how to study for specific question types,  and advice on applying to graduate school.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

iPads, Kindles and Laptops

CW Community:

We want to remind you that we have Kindles, iPads and Laptops available for in-Library use.
If you'd like to reserve a Kindle or iPad in advance, as these units have limited availability, please contact 
lib-online@cw.edu 

Please stop by to use our technology - and recommend an app for our iPads.

LLC Staff




Thursday, February 14, 2013

iPads in Education by Kelly Walsh


Have you read iPads in Education: Implementations, Apps, & Insights by our own Kelly Walsh? 

·         iPads in Education: Implementations, Apps, & Insights is an edited and expanded compilation of articles originally published on Kelly Walsh's blog, EmergingEdTech  in 2011 & 2012 providing a broad overview of many ways in which iPads are being used in the educational context in schools across the world.

·         The eBook has enjoyed moderate success since it has been on the market – about 200 copies have been sold to date (EmergingEdTech.com is an excellent marketing platform).

·         This is the second eBook written by Kelly Walsh. He also publishes a “Free Education Technology Resources eBook” that is revised each year (this is free for blog subscribers and thousands of copies are downloaded every year).

·         Kelly is currently working on his next book, a “Flipped Classroom Workshop-in-a-Book”, which he hopes to publish this spring. 


On your break or during lunch, feel free to read it in the CW Library on our new iPads!






Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Our Blog Audience

Thanks to Google, our Library Blog audience is depicted in varied shades of green on the map.  Please continue to spread the news about our blog.

Securing Library Media for Classroom Viewing
















Media options in the Library include the physical borrowing of DVDs from our collection and digital offerings through our account with Netflix.com. Not in all cases is a  movie available on Netflix for instant viewing and we do accept requests for DVD acquisitions regardless of a Netflix option.

Please contact a librarian or library staff member at  x. 280 with any questions about borrowing or accessing the Netflix account.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Fiscal Cliff FAQs

Do you still have questions about the Fiscal Cliff you're afraid to ask?  Well, thank The Washington Post for making things clear.

Fiscal Cliff - Frequently Asked Questions