Well, it’s been about a month since its inception, but Google’s latest creation seems to be a hit.  Google Scholar is now available for various scholarly articles but also provides a great source for legal opinions.  

Most importantly for attorneys, Google Scholar provides access to state cases going back to 1950, and federal cases going back to 1924.  Therefore, Google Scholar provides at least 50 years of state and federal cases that have been reported. And you can search these databases using the same word based queries  used in the regular Google engine.  Finally, this service works great on your Blackberry or iPhone, so with a couple of quick clicks, you find cases at your fingertips on your mobile device.

The available version is still in its “beta” phase, making it far from perfect. However, it is FREE, and it is very easily accessible for those attorneys always on the go, in court or in meetings where a laptop and Westlaw is more than a quick click away.  Find the service below, and enjoy its price: FREE!

http://scholar.google.com/

Google has recently launched Google Scholar, which is an amazing free resource for both lawyers and non-lawyers to research the law.  Everyone can now read the full legal opinions of U.S. State, Federal and Appellate cases.

These cases can be searched by the case name, or topic. Further, one can now easily see how a legal opinion has influenced other Judges by reviewing the citing page, and related cases page.

For example if you wanted to read the famous NY Court of Appeals Case People v. Huntley which allows a defendant to challenge the voluntariness and lawful nature of any statement made to the police you could easily do that.

This is an important case to know about because if a defendant requests a Huntley hearing, and is successful at the  hearing, any incriminating statements made will be precluded from trial.  The hearing Judge will consider the following factors to determine if the statements were voluntary:

• Whether the defendant was in custody at the time of the statement. If so, whether the defendant waives hid Miranda rights.
• Whether the police used unfair coercion or violence
• Whether the police made promises to the defendant
• Whether the defendant mad ethe statement on his own free will
• Whether the statements were obtained as a result of an illegal arrest

The Judge must find that voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt before the confession can be submitted to the trial jury.

Here’s how to use Google Scholar:

1. Start at Google Scholar
2. Click Google Advanced Scholar Search on the right side of the search box
3. Type Huntley into the “with all of the words” search box
4. Scroll down to Legal Opinions and Journals, Search only Court opinions from the following states, and check New York
5. Click Search Scholar
6. Once you pull up the case, if you click on the “How Cited” link you can see 1) How this document has been cited and 2) Related documents

Source: Tenurometer (2009), developed by Diep Thi Hoang & Fil Menczer, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington.

It seems that it is possible (to some extent at least) to exclude self-citation in Google Scholar, this is how:

1. Search for author name in the usual way
2. Click “cited by number“
3. Identify how Google Scholar represents the name you want to exclude in the hits (typically “A Name”)
4. Add a standard Google query string which excludes the name you identified in point 3 to your current citation url in the following format &q=-”A Name”

A practical example of removing self-reference: Aspects of the theory of syntax by N Chomsky without self citation:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7563750853896762876&hl=en&as_sdt=2000&q=-”N Chomsky”

This reduces the original number of hits from “around 12,350″ to “around 11,600″.

Perhaps this is useful? Feedback?

My colleagues and friends know that I am no fan of Google.  Only Ambassadors of Satan thumb their noses at copyright law while peering into my back yard with rolling cameras.  Do no evil? 

However, this is a cool Google search engine, and it probably doesn’t trample the intellectual property rights of others.  Google Scholar: take it for a test ride today!

http://scholar.google.com/

iPhone user? Lawyer? Or simply interested in the law? Remember last week’s Studio post about Google Scholar’s Advanced Search and legal authorities?

Run, don’t walk, to Jeff Richardson’s great post at iPhone J.D. about using Google Scholar on your iPhone to track down free legal resources. Richardson discusses how to access, set up a bookmark to Scholar search for a specific jurisdiction and other tips, with screenshots and examples of how the results will appear. Check out his take on the new Wexis killer and take Scholar out for a legal spin.

Thanks to your feedback we have made some changes to the Library Gateway which we think you will like.

Google Scholar

We have added a link to Google Scholar – that’s Google’s “scholarly literature” search tool.   And if you access it by the Library Gateway, Google Scholar will include SHU Links options on its results pages.  This makes it easy to link to the full text of articles on electronic journals that we subscribe to, or to request articles through the Document Supply Service.   Google scholar is particularly useful if you only have an article title.

LitSearch

The LitSearch section and the Quick search of popular databases have been separated so it’s clearer what each does.

More information

We have added help information via the icons for more of the services on the Gateway.

Please keep using  the Feedback link on the Library Gateway; all feedback helps us improve our services.

Maybe I am behind the times or a visionary, but if my web developing skills were of a level where I could design a search engine,  I would.  I would a design a search engine specific to the laws of the land.  Then, individuals like you and I who are literate with access to the internet could go to my search engine and research all things law-related.  You could look up the legal code governing our financial industry to the different criteria required to constitute a felony in California versus that of New York.  You could compare tenant law in New York City to tenant rights’ law in Berkeley.  Or you could simply enter your address and look at the relevant legal code protecting the rivers in your jurisdiction.  And, then you could look up the layman’s interpretation of those laws you just looked up.  And then, you could look up stuff like bar exams, law reviews, articles about the law, video of cases to follow in real-time (imagine following Judge Sotomayor’s first year!) or the archived video, blogs about the law like Glenn Greenwald’s on Salon.com, and the case-law that created that particular legislation:  ”Oh, so that’s why we can’t walk across Route 9 with an open container!”  And, there would be a section for military law.

Oh yeeeah.

And, there would be an international section!  International Law of the Seas, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everything one would need to know about the Nuremberg trials, or Mexican legal code and explanations about the differences between them, or why Venezuela has had 20+ constitutions since its inception and copies of all those, etc.  And, the history of all that, and much more!  It would be a monumental project, but incredibly informative and necessary to be a responsible enfranchised citizen.  And, transparent.  The government would never be able to slip anything by us, ever.  We, citizens, would be empowered.

It would be beautiful because it would be true democracy.

In the meantime, Google has some version of my long-held vision (Just one more reason why I am positive my phone calls are tapped and my house is bugged because all my wonderful ideas suddenly appear after I voice them aloud).  I don’t know how long it’s been there or hasn’t been there, but it’s there.  Under, the Google Scholar link, there’s an announcement of the new beta version of their blog that has instructions to finding the laws that govern us.  Basically, you can search using a topic (ex: prostitution) or the case name (, and then click the button at the bottom that says legal opinions and journals and you’re off!

Awesome, right?

Google is out to save us all.

We all know how useful Google is in our continuous search for information.  I use it every day as a medical dictionary, to verify addresses & phone numbers as well as to obtain directions. I use it to check out the “skinny” on doctors before I depose them.  It is like the Library of Congress, the phone book, a world atlas and Sherlock Holmes all wrapped into one.

But here are some other Google tools that may power up your practice (Bear with me if you know these already):

1. Google maps give you satellite images. If you need an image of an accident scene or a crime scene, you can go to http://maps.google.com/, put in an address & when it comes up, click on Satellite & you can zoom in to your location.  I actually find that Bing’s version of this is even better- http://www.bing.com/maps/.  If you put in an address or intersection & hit “Enter”, a map appears.  Then, click on “Aerial” and “Bird’s Eye” and a clear photo of that location comes up.  I settled a PI case recently in which I sent the adjuster a link to the Bing Bird’s Eye map so that he could see that his client’s description of the accident was impossible because of the configuration of the accident scene.  This “Bird’s Eye” view is even better than the photos you can take of the accident scene.  It can have other applications.  I handle criminal cases as part of my practice.  I am waiting for the right circumstances to try to use one of these Bird’s Eye views to cross examine an Officer, such as, in a DWI case (after laying the right foundation) on the issue of whether the field sobriety tests were administered on a street that was not as pristine as the Officer would have the Judge believe.

2. Google Scholar (Scholar.google.com)-

A.    Scholar allows you to search for cases & learned treatises on a topic. This is a new feature.  Let’s say you search in Google scholar the following: “maryland case law & search & seizure.”  You might only get Supreme Court cases.  But if you then go to “Advanced Scholar Search” on the right hand of the “Search” button, you can change the search to Maryland court decisions.  The cases will come up with your search terms color coded.  They will be ranked according to how often they are cited, so theoretically, the case that is first is the one that has been used as precedent the most often & is the strongest case. You still need to search for any changes, reversals and for the newest cases.  If you click on “How cited”, it will show you the cases in which this decision has been cited & the context of the cite so that you can proceed to those cases.  This is an additional search engine to supplement whatever legal search library you are using & to speed up your review of the case law.

B.  You can use Scholar to research what an expert has written. You will be surprised how many articles that your opposing expert has written that will not necessarily appear in Google, but will appear in Google Scholar.  Whenever you are preparing for a deposition of an expert (or making your own choice of an expert) you should perform this search.   I recently used Google Search in a Social Security Disability case, which represents a significant part of my practice.  Last September, I came back from vacation to find a report from a neurologist on my desk.  The Administrative Law Judge in the case sent the file out to this neurologist for a review of the medical reports without  a physical exam of my client.  The report was devastating.  In no uncertain terms the doctor found that my client had no limitations from her Multiple Sclerosis and that she could be working.  I was sure that the Judge was ready to deny the claim based on this report.  I went to Google & found out some biographical information about the doctor, but not much more.  I then went to Google Scholar & put in the doctor’s name & up came a ton of articles.  It appears that this guy loves to write articles & see his name as an author/authority (even more than me) .  So I then narrowed my search by putting in his name & Multiple Sclerosis & up came an article from 25 years ago that the good doctor had co-authored.  In the article, the doctor wrote that a full diagnosis for MS could not be made without an examination, because a patient can have negative brain scans.  His conclusion was that, even with a negative scan, positive findings on physical exam are sufficient to prove that the patient has MS.  Well, my client had positive MRIs for MS & here was the same doctor concluding that she was fine w/out performing an exam.  Therefore, my argument to the Judge was that this doc’s opinion was inconsistent with his own writings & I was able to prevent the Judge from issuing a quick denial of the claim.

3.   Use Google to find out of print or obscure books & articles. Google has done an amazing job of making original text available to us all- see books.google.com.  When you read an article or treatise in preparation of a brief or a court cites a text, google the citation or footnote.  Also, if you are arguing legislative intent, google for op-ed articles written by the supporters and proponents of the law & see if Google’s crawlers have scanned in the testimony from the legislative history.  I’ll give you an example from research I did in a non-legal situation.  I was working on a documentary for the synagogue to which I belong, Har Sinai, in Owings Mills.  There is a brilliant tome called “Maryland, A Middle Temparment: 1634- 1980″ by Robert J. Brugger (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) which discusses Maryland in the Civil War and states that the Mayor of Baltimore at the time, George William Brown, was jailed as a Southern sympathizer.  In Brugger’s endnotes, he includes a citation to a book written by Brown himself about the War.  So, i put the name of the book into Google & hit “Search” & up came the ENTIRE BOOK.  I could read Brown’s own account of Civil War Baltimore.   I read in his own words that he blamed President Lincoln for the Civil War, that the South was merely defending itself against Union aggression & that Judge Taney correctly decided the Dred Scott decision.  Instead of relying on another author’s conclusion that Brown was a Southern sympathizer, I could read Brown’s own words.  There are other books that Google has scanned into its data base that are first person accounts of Baltimore in the 1870’s that you could never find in your public library. These accounts are much more powerful than the interpretations of other writers.

I am sure that I have missed many other important uses of Google for our practices.  I welcome any replies, comments or real life experiences, so that I can share them with our S&S (Small & Solo) members.  After all, the purpose of this blog is to share information that can enhance the practices of all Balto County S&Ss.

Thanks for reading & have a great weekend.  Jeff

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/google-scholar-now/
Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com is now including full-text legal opinions from U.S. Federal and State District, Appellate, and Supreme courts in Google Scholar.  This is not expected to replace Lexis Nexis or Westlaw since it does not

cover the time dating from the beginning of our country, nor to the beginnings of the individual states. There are no hyperlinks to statutes, codes, regulations, administrative opinions, or anything else quoted or referred to in the text of the opinions. Finally, there is no citator service to verify that a particular opinion has not been overruled or vacated, distinguished, or otherwise declared of dubious value.1

Although I worked in a law library for two weeks, I am by no means a law librarian (I didn’t even know what case law was when I started).   However, I have used Westlaw and I can support the above statement.  The search functionality, the comprehensiveness, and the forward and backward linking capability cannot be matched by Google.  Google is very good at digitizing large amounts of material and making it available online for free, but they are no database vendor.

OK, time for me to insert a bit of snooty librarian attitude into this discussion.  OK, first off, I am not against Google; nor am I against relevancy ranking and the new so-called “discovery tools.”  In fact, I am exited by their potential in making research easier for undergraduates and look forward to exploring them further.  However, when you are dealing with high-end research, especially legal or medical research, you need the right tools to get the right information; and you need to know how to use them.  When  Google engineer Anurag Acharya was asked about their algorithm for showing search results, he said “magic.”  What we do know is that like Lexis and Westlaw, Google ranks cases from higher courts higher than lower courts and also by the number of times a case has been cited.  Overall, I think Google’s venture into case law is great for non legal professionals or for anyone who already knows of a specific case they would like to find.  But for legal professionals needing to do comprehensive research, the old tried and true (and very expensive) Lexis Nexis and Westlaw will continue to rule!

Source used:  http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Judicial-Opinions-Now-Available-in-Google-Scholar-58031.asp

Google Scholar has added a free database to its site allowing one to search case law.  Be Spacific has more information.

The addition of case law and patent search functions to Google Scholar, and subsequent comments from Richard Nash, prompted the following thoughts, which are mine alone:

In my view, the U.S. market for high-end computer-assisted legal research (CALR) currently requires at least the following systems features:

• complete and current collections of primary law;
• large collections of quality secondary legal resources;
• retrieval systems that can search across multiple primary and secondary legal resource databases; and
• specialized and current descriptive metadata applied to document segments, especially citator systems and knowledge representation for points of law.

This high-end market appears to be shrinking, for several reasons:

• clients are forcing cost reductions;
• the low-end legal research market (which typically offers only “plain-vanilla” retrieval of primary legal documents containing little if any descriptive metadata) is offering better metadata (currently citators and, probably before long, subject access to whole documents, if not segments); and
• many lawyers and paralegals appear to be learning to live with the features offered by low-end systems, according to recent survey evidence, such as that from the latest ABA Legal Technology Survey Report.

Google’s U.S. CALR strategy so far seems to have been to engage with this sector from the bottom up. Google first developed its presence in the low-end market by indexing the free case law available on the Web. This week, it has advanced “up market” by integrating that primary legal resource retrieval system with the secondary legal resource retrieval systems of Google Scholar and Google Book Search.

I think that, if Google really wants to compete for the high-end market, its next steps would be:

• to fill the holes in the primary legal resource collections that it indexes (perhaps by offering incentives to organizations that publish primary legal resources free of charge on the Web);
• to build an effective, automated legal citator, as Andrew Plumb-Larrick discusses in his fine post today; and
• to develop a good quality, automated knowledge representation system to provide subject access to individual primary legal documents (i.e., individual statutes, cases, and regulations).

An interesting white paper published earlier this year by Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle may shed light on Google’s next steps. That paper notes Google’s aptitude for developing sophisticated automatic metadata creation systems, such as the one underlying Google Mobile App, that incorporate improvements drawn from the study of large numbers of user searches. This aptitude suggests that Google probably won’t need very long to build a good quality automatic legal citator and subject indexing system, if it has a mind to. If Google takes those further steps, then I think it could take a big share of the high-end CALR market. At the very least, its efforts, coupled with Bloomberg’s, should result in increased competition, lower prices, and more innovation yielding better retrieval tools for users in the U.S. CALR sector. (On the obstacles to innovation in the U.S. CALR sector, see Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s recent post on VoxPopuLII.)

Google’s ongoing development of its legal research system could also yield additional benefits for the legal community. The O’Reilly-Battelle white paper notes Google’s skill at identifying implicit structures in large data sets. These implicit structures can complement express, formal descriptive metadata, such as, in the legal realm, West’s Key Number System, Lexis’s Headnotes, or Bloomberg’s Points of Law. One great potential benefit for the legal community in Google’s development of its legal research system, is the (automated) discovery of previously unknown, implicit structures in primary and secondary legal information. Some legal scholars are already exploring this area by using techniques developed in connection with the study of complex adaptive systems. I think Google may also have important contributions to make to this area of research, particularly if it chooses to publish its research findings.

On November 17 Google Scholar made a large collection of US Federal and State case law available online. See: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html

While Google has yet not provided details of the extent of the coverage, it appears as though coverage of US Supreme Court decisions begin with volume 1 of the United States Reports and other Federal and State decisions begin at 1950. (Our test of volume 10 (1810) of the United States Reports found every case we searched).

It is unclear what Google’s sources are for much of this case law (some appears to come from publicresource.org) but all cases have the same pagination as the printed reporters but do not include editorial content such as headnotes and Key Numbers.

At this stage of course the commercial sources’ (Lexis, Westlaw) added editorial content and the ability to note up make them a more complete academic research tool. Still this is an interesting development that could lead to wider access to US case law in the same way that CANLII has increased access to Canadian case law.

In addition to US case law Google Scholar also searches some major online journal collections such as Hein and JSTOR. Searching Google scholar while connected to the UofT network will link you to the full article via the Library’s licensed access to Hein or JSTOR. When not connected to the UofT network, search results are limited to only the first page of a journal article.

We will update this entry as more information comes out.

You may remember a while back a post here in the Studio about legal reporter and article results in Google Book Search. You can also pull case law results from Google Scholar Advanced Scholar Search. As can be seen from the search page, results cull legal opinions from federal and state courts and legal journals.

Maybe you don’t know what Google Scholar is? From the site:

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citations
• Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of research

There are date restrictions on the case law. While the Supreme Court material goes back to the 1700’s, federal and state case law begins in the 20th century.

More free and legal here in the Studio.

Hat tip to BeSpacific.

[NOTE: Updated on 17 November 2009 to link to Andrew Plumb-Larrick's post, Carole Levitt's post, and to Greg Lambert's post and list of links.]

Google Scholar now indexes selected judicial decisions and patents, metadata for which are available on the Internet. Note the “How Cited” feature.

Andrew Plumb-Larrick has written a fine post describing the new system.

Carole Levitt gathers much valuable commentary about the new system here. HT @montserratlj.

Greg Lambert published a useful list of links about the system, and a fine post commenting on it.

HT @justia

An article published not too recently on HCPlive has irked a few health librarians on LIS-Medical. This excerpt in particular seems designed to rub us the wrong way:

Forget your local medical library and PubMed and use Google Scholar to search for scholarly literature published in the form of peer-reviewed pieces, theses, books, and abstracts from any number of scholarly organizations, including professional societies, universities, and academic publishers.

One librarian has responded to the piece with enthusiasm, suggesting she had become fed up with PubMed. The Krafty Librarian has sounded off about PubMed recently, to say while PubMed had always hidden the controlled vocabulary, the MeSH, it had become even more hidden with the recent revamp. Is this a full-on backlash against PubMed, or a few disgruntled individuals?

I find myself not wanting to agree with the librarians who slated the HCPlive article. I would like to think that the words ‘forget your local medical library’ are indeed fighting words (to light a fire under our sometimes complacent bums). Can our local medical libraries not compete with Google Scholar, seeing as they have must have full access to this free search engine, and many more databases and resources that may not be free or as ‘user friendly’?

I disagree with the librarian who insists that doctors are at danger of ‘wasting their time’ by engaging with new web technologies such as apps. This is downright patronising to doctors-why should they not be allowed to keep up to date on their own, if they want?

He also stated that to miss out the apostrophe in ‘Crohn’s disease’ was a calamity in Google Scholar. No it isn’t-check out the ‘Did you mean’ suggestion at the top of the results. Google is great for spell-checking!

Just had an “I’m a genius, no, maybe I’m an idiot” moment.

My supervisor has been killing me trying to get me to find a “literature” that fits my research interests. I’ve been poking around, basically based on the protocol that if I use google scholar to search enough key words, eventually something will show up.

That was the plan until I got an unfinished bit of research from the University of New Orleans. In their bibliography (new definition of nerd is that I skip ahead to the bibliography — exciting!) there was a link to a 1961 article on organizational incentives. Oddly, the article was by a colleague of my favorite professor at Penn.

The article was perfect, except it was old. It dealt with typologizing organizations, characterizing their functions, it was the type of theory I could use to do my field work. I quickly flipped to the back to look for other sources.

Only problem? It was from 1961. So all the sources were ancient (sorry for all readers born before 1961 — that’s you mom).

So I was stuck. Until I came up with my best idea of the week (granted, it’s only Tuesday). I brought the article up on google scholar and clicked the “article citations” link.

There in front of me were 514 more recent articles that had cited my original work.

Genius, I thought.

Until I asked myself why it took me a year at Oxford to figure out how to use the article citations link.

Pumpkin Patch at Earthbound Farms in Carmel Valley

This presentation addressed directly the conference theme.  In other words, the person proposing the session was paying attention.  Peter Jasco gave an impressive and candid account of the state of indexing and abstracting services.  Jasco believes that libraries can save huge amounts of money (tens of thousands, if not more) by cutting back on indexing and abstracting services and relying on other sources for those services.  He does think that Google offers a part of the answer, but not Google Scholar, which is software that is seriously flawed.  Jasco admits to having confronted Google representatives at conferences and demonstrating to them the problems in the company’s software, and Jasco said that the representatives have been evasive in their responses.

The problems with Google Scholar are both wide and deep, according to Jasco, starting with Google Scholar’s inability to handle Boolean searches. The software produces some embarrassing search results when it orders results chronologically.  It was laughable to see Jasco’s slides of the number of possible relevant results produced for a search with the parameters, say, 1960-2009, and then the results for the same search with the chronological parameters of 1980-2009.  Anyone would expect that the number of possible relevant results would decrease with a more constricted chronology.  The reverse turns out to be the case with Google Scholar.  Jasco convinced his audience that Google Scholar needs less “goo” and more “scholar.”  He knew the audience would chuckle at his slides, but he was not laughing. For him, such failures mean people have not done their jobs correctly.

For other reasons, Jasco said that he does not a see a future for librarians trained solely to produce indexes and abstracts.

Jasco possesses the confidence of a man who knows of what he speaks.  He has spent a good portion of his life studying the topic, and it shows.  IL2009 benefits from his presence.

Did you know that you can use Google Scholar to access our subscription journal articles?

If you’re on campus Google Scholar will recognise your ip address. The words “Wolverhampton Uni links” will appear next to those articles which we subscribe to.

Click on the link and you’ll see a University of Wolverhampton page. It’ll tell you whether full text is available, and how to get to it.

You can do this off campus too. But off campus you’ll need to use this URL: https://register.wlv.ac.uk/xap.plx?url=200. It’s listed on the Databases A-Z. The URL will work for both on and off campus searches.

Note – if the “Wolverhampton Uni links” message appears, you should get access to the full text; but sometimes you won’t. If you don’t get access it means that our link resolver has out-of-date or wrong information. Let us know if you hit a snag.

I would not consider myself, as Prensky identifies many young people, as a ’Digital Native’. In many ways I feel that I am rather inept at using most programmes on the computer. I have no interest in downloading music from the internet and I frequently prefer to read articles and newspapers on paper and not online.

However, whilst I feel like I rarely use ICT, in actual fact I use, and rely on it, more than I realise. 

For instance, I like to shop on-line, especially on Amazon, and during my years as an undergraduate I often did my grocery shopping online. Shopping in this way is much more convenient and less time-consuming. Moreover, when researching for an essay or assignment the first place I look for information is always the internet, using sites such as JSTOR and Google Scholar. I have also become particularly proficient in typing, mainly due to the number of essays I have written on Word, and in some ways, whilst I like editing work with pen and paper, I prefer typing an essay than hand-writing it as it is easier to change, erase, or add in new information or ideas.

During my average day I use ICT quite frequently. In the morning I switch on my computer and check my e-mails, Facebook, and the news headlines on the BBC website.  I use my mobile phone during the day to make phone calls and send texts. I can access the internet on my mobile phone, which helps when trying to find information when there is no internet or computer readily available. During lectures we are constantly bombarded with different kinds of ICT. For instance, in the core lectures for science, mathematics, and English, the interactive whiteboard (Smart board) is constantly in use for different purposes. These include PowerPoint presentations, videos to watch regarding teaching, or a means to illustrate different kinds of games and learning activities that are available for children to play on the board. In ICT we are learning about the use of blogs. After lectures I use my computer to check blackboard and my e-mails again, before watching a programme on BBC iPlayer or an equivalent site.

The one huge area that I have not immersed myself in with ICT is the downloading of music. I do not own an IPOD, nor do I use the internet to download music tracks or buy CD’s. Whilst I realise that this practice has become the norm for most people, and is a much cheaper way to buy music, it does not interest me. I prefer to buy an actual CD, with the lyrics and notes that come with it, than purchasing a song online. However, I do listen to music online, via youtube and similar sites.

In reflection, I realise that I am much more reliant on ICT, in its various forms, than I initially realised. Whilst I may not be able to understand all the complexities of computers and the endless things that can be done with them, I do understand the basics and use them to the best of my ability. Programmes such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are relatively simple to use and may prove to be useful in the classroom. My ability to use these well may prove to be an advantage. A good use of ICT seems to be essential in the world that we live in today. As most people communicate via e-mails, texts, programmes such as Skype, and mobile phone calls, a good grasp of technology is crucial. As children become better users of technology, as a teacher it means that I need a good grasp of what interests them. In this sense it is key to have a good understanding of technological advancements. However, a reliance on ICT is a danger as although it may prove to be engaging to children, it can be over-used and as a teacher it is crucial to have a varied lesson where all kinds of resources are used. For instance, it may prove to be better to show children how electricity flows through getting the class to act out an electric current rather than getting them to watch a video of this happening on the IWB. A balance in using ICT is fundamental to good teaching.

We are always looking for the next great idea and we think you have it!

A Suggestion Box has been installed in the library and now the only thing it needs is your ideas.

Where?

• Look to your right when you walk in. It is mounted on the wall next to the New Books Board.