This last week featured Digital Learning Day, a time to learn about and use technology effectively to improve education at all levels – from grade school to college to your career.  Technology is all around us – so ubiquitous, in fact, that sometimes we don’t even notice it, or take full advantage of it.

At IU East, smart classrooms let our professors link us to all kinds of multimedia.  Computer labs reside in every building, some with specialized programs for math or art or video design.  You can connect to the wireless network anywhere on campus.  And IU offers you thousands of dollars worth of free software for your home computer.

Chances are you use the web and Wikipedia and Facebook far more than you ever have used a conventional encyclopedia or newspaper or phonebook.  But there’s much more to digital education than the free internet – and the library has the sources that matter for your research.  Need books?  We have around 150,000 from databases like eBrary, Books 24×7, EBSCO Ebooks, Brill, Wiley Online, and CredoRef.  Articles?  Our scholarly databases include millions of full text journal, newspaper, and magazine articles.  Or how about videos?  Kitten videos on YouTube are cute, but the 20,000 academic e-videos we subscribe to will actually make your papers and projects better.

Prefer to work in the library, rather than at home?  There’s more here to suit your needs.  Try our collaboration station, and link your laptops together on a big screen.  Or dictate your paper by using Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, available in the study room.  And if you want tangible books and videos, you can even text the call numbers to yourself from our catalog.

However you learn, technology can help improve your work and research.  Let us help you – and send us your questions at iueref@iue.edu!