Gale Virtual Reference Library

Our 8th graders will soon be studying the American Civil War, so I decided to look at the history area of Gale Virtual Reference Library.  I then clicked on the History section, and chose American Civil War Reference Library.  This reference resource has five volumes available with a copyright date of 2000.  I looked at the eTable of Contents and chose the American Civil War Timeline.  This timeline would certainly be helpful to our students as they work on their research project and try to keep all Civil War events in the right chronological order.  I then browsed through the eIndex and look at several articles.  I can see that this reference source would be very helpful to our 8th graders for their research project because it provides ample information and illustrations on the different battles and key people of the Civil War.

I tried several different searches in "Basic Search" that had to do with Ancient China since our 6th grade students will start studying that topic this week.  I did three different searches and searched for clay army, Great Wall of China, and the Chinese New Year.  I did not find a whole lot of information for these specific topics, but I did find a lot of information on Ancient China.  Unfortunately, I think the reading level on most of the sources will be too hard for my 6th graders.  Although the Read Speaker feature would be very helpful to those students with a lower reading level.  Also, the translation feature into another language would be great for our ESL students.  Gale Virtual Reference Library is another great resource that the State Library has provided for us, and we are so fortunate to have these services available for our students!

Proquest-Publications Tab

I searched for "School Library Journal" under the Publications tab in Proquest.  It came up as full text with issues available form 1996 to the current year.  I just received my February 2011 issue of School Library Journal in the mail today, so I clicked on that issue in the results list for my search.  The articles from this issue of School Library Journal are all available on Proquest.  I also searched for "school libraries" under the search option found on the right side of screen titled " Find More Documents Like This".  The results came up with many more articles about school libraries.  I think this is a great feature to have if you are looking for a certain topic.

Proquest

I searched for "The Alamo" on the Proquest database because our 8th grade students will start a research project next week on this topic.  I got 452 results in my search.  The first ten results that I looked at were book reviews which would not be helpful for our students with their research project.  I then looked at the results on the next couple of screens, and again I found more book or video reviews and one magazine article that might be helpful.  The rest of the results were not appropriate for our research project.  I then did an advanced search using "Alamo" and "American History" as search terms, but added "not book reviews" as the third search term.  I got 21 results from this search.  Again I found more book and film reviews and not much else for information that would be helpful in the 8th grade research project.  Am I searching incorrectly?  I could see my students would be quickly on Google with this type of results on Proquest.  I have used Proquest in the past, but I always found a lot of book reviews in my results list.  I also think that the reading level might be too advanced for most of our middle school students.  I have encouraged our gifted class to use Proquest for their research projects.

SIRS Discoverer

When I teach the use of the online databases to our middle school students, I find myself often telling them that SIRS Discoverer is my favorite online database!  I think it is an attractive and easy to use database for the students.  I like the little summary that comes up for each of the hits in the results list.  This is so helpful to the students because they can quickly read to find out if the article might be helpful in their research.  Of course, you can immediately see which articles have pictures and what type of informational source it is by using the tabs at the top of the screen.  I usually introduce the tabs to my students by asking how many magazines articles come up when they do a search.  They love being the first one to discover the tabs and tell how many magazine articles were found in their search.  I find that the lexile levels are really not helpful to the students, so I teach them to look at the green, blue and red book icons that indicate the reading levels of the articles.  I also teach them to use the Descriptors to give them added key word searches for more information.

The "Country Facts" and "Maps of the World" are great features that I could use more with our 7th grade social studies classes.  I didn't realize that teacher resources came up when you did a search for a country in the "Country Facts" feature.  I must share this with my teachers!

I was excited to see the "Science Fair Explorer" feature because all of our 7th and 8th graders are expected to do a science project every year.  I like the way this feature is set up, but the few experiments that I looked at were way too easy to be considered acceptable by our science teachers which was disappointing.

In SIRS Issues Researcher I looked at the topic, Cell Phones in Schools.  I am very impressed by the setup of this database.  I like the Pro/Con, Perspectives, and the Critical Thinking and Analysis features.  They truly provide the information the student need, but also guides them through the debate process.  The Additional Resources are great features to help guide the students through the whole process of gathering information and delivering their debate topics.

Under the "Curriculum Pathfinders" I chose Medical Science under the Science tab.  The information that comes up is very broad.  You can narrow your results by the type of resource or the type of medical science.  I will have to play with this feature a little more to decide if this feature would be that helpful to our students and teachers.

Learning Express: Ebooks

The ebooks on Learning Express provide a wealth of information for people from many different walks of life!  This resource is certainly a great way to prepare people for many of the exams that they will need to take in their career paths or otherwise in their life. 

As far as our students are concerned, I think the reading and math practice tests would be great to prepare them for the Dakota Step test and to evaluate what skills they need to work on.  I think our teachers already use these tests with their students, but I am certainly going to double check that they are aware of this valuable resource.

Learning Express: Job Search and Workplace Skills

I think this feature of Learning Express would be a great help for anyone looking for a job!  I did the Career Course: Interview Tips to Get the Job You Want.  I found it easy to read and concise enough that a person could easily find the tips they need before a job interview.  I also liked the feature where you could stop in the middle of the course and then later continue at the same point where you had stopped previously.

Learning Express: Taking the Test

I did the Grade 6 Reading Diagnostic 1: Informational Text test.  I thought the test was age appropriate as the test had you read about cats as pets which would be interesting to a sixth grade student.  I liked that when you viewed the answers of your test,  you are given the reason why the answer is correct.  This would be very helpful to students to help them improve their reading comprehension.