Thursday, March 5, 2015

World Book School Edition - SD Library Challenge

Lets start the SD Library Challenge!

Lesson 1a -- World Book School Edition

1. Using World Book Kids, search for information on a mammal of your choice. Find a picture and information about its habitat. Buffalo, called American bison, wild oxen.
Predators of people, mountain lions and wolves (be careful NSU!!).
Habitat, grasslands.
*Text with big characters, few lines with info, translation of an article to Spanish and French. Simple and fun for kids.

2. Using World Book Student, search for information on the same mammal you searched in World Book Kids and compare the amount of information.
If you browser Buffalo, you will find:
Buffalo NY and
Buffalo the mammal.
*Text with regular size characters, the amount of information is bigger than World Book Kids, e.g., interesting facts, classification, anatomy, some major characteristics, way of life, reproduction, pics, video etc. The site has research tools, Search for headlines, Biography Center etc.
Proper for 5-9 years old kids and maybe more.

3. Using World Book Advanced, search for a country. Notice the types of information available on the left and right side bars of the first results screen. Click on the link for your desired country, and again notice the types of information on the left and right side bars of the screen. What types of information will be most valuable to your patrons or students? 
Results for the word Country (4374 items) connected me to different resources e.g., encyclopedia, online books (nine languages), primary sources and other search results like literary criticism, maps etc.
Clicked the link Israel, I found that U.S. is Israeli's main trading partner. Very friendly design of the site, easy to read. It has a valuable feature called, recent developments that you can subscribe and receive actualizations about the country.
Another feature in World Book Advanced is located in the main page is called: Today in the history. I believe in we ask the students to search periodically, data related to the date, they will explore the website and get use to and eventually use it frequently. For example, today Joseph Stalin died in 1953. Yesterday Vermont became the 14th U.S. colony in 1791.
 4. Using World Book Discover, use the browse function on the right side of the screen to find an article about American government. Notice the features on the article page. How will World Book Discover help your patrons or students who are not good readers of English?
I discover the feature for not good writers in English. I wrote "American government" and wrote back to me: the search term has been replaced with "American government". Can read or give you the phonetic of the word too. Very good for me an other English as a second language speakers that are not sure about the pronunciation of the word. The search result:
Encyclopedia articles, 280 items.
Videos, 1
Tables, 23
Websites, 1