Whew! I've had trouble getting to this point... The Blog component may be my biggest challenge, not familiarizing myself with and navigating through the library resources! Thanks, Julie, for helping me get to this point.
1. I chose dolphins, as they are one of my favorite animals. As a young child, I watched them "lead" ships into Port Aransas Bay in Texas. I found 3 pictures, 3 videos, and 13 articles in World Book Kids. There was a wide array of articles: dolphins, porpoises, Dan Marino, poetry, Atlantic Ocean, etc. The main article was 9-paragraphs long. I think it would be interesting to show students a list of words such as the following, and have them predict and explain which words they think they would come up for a given animal. (Dolphin example: Atlantic Ocean, Missouri River, jellyfish, porpoises, mammals, reptiles, Marino, Brett Favre, etc.) Then give them time to go to the site and actually do the search. Were they right?I see immediate applications for our 3rd graders as they already do a computer-based research project on an animal of choice. They could step right into the related web sites found on the left. I also liked having the option to hear text read aloud. It was helpful to be able to double-click on a word to define it, too. Younger students will think this is cool!
2. There was much more information on dolphins in World Book student. There were 66 articles instead of 13, 7 pictures instead of 3, 4 videos instead of 1, and 29 paragraphs instead of 9. There was more "meat" in the articles. I liked the main sections outlined on the left side. I enjoyed poking around the tables. I found the table on animal intelligence particularly interesting. Finding dolphins on that list didn't surprise me, but did you know that elephants and pigs are the best problem solvers among the hoofed animals? I didn't!
3. I chose Bangladesh as my country. The left side had maps, tables, sounds, historical maps, related web sites, and much more. World Book Advanced is impressive. Our high school English teachers require students to use the Citation Builder found here for research papers. Our fourth grade teachers will enjoy the "Explore South Dakota" for Social Studies. They do a Wax Museum of famous SD people, so the biographies will prove helpful. There are wonderful graphs of things like average January and July temperatures, which I will be pointing out to both our elementary and MS math teachers.
4. World Book Discover can help patrons who aren't good English readers in a number of ways. Words can be defined by double-clicking on them. Text can be translated into other language and/or read aloud at different speeds. I can see that I need to do a better job of educating our teachers as to what is available in the line of online references, thanks to South Dakota State Library.
Is it still possible to have SD State Library Staff come and do an inservice for individual schools? If so, please refresh my memory: who would we contact? How much time would you recommend for such an endeavor?
Mrs. K, I'm the East River contact for electronic resources and would love to come to your school. I'll email you about that separately. Thanks for your great comments here. I love to see the creative ways you can use World Book and know what to share with which teachers. You mentioned many of the great things about World Book, and here are a few more: In Kids, look at World of Animals. :) In Student and Advanced, try out the Timelines. In Discover, look at the Visual Dictionary and World Book Explains. LOTS of great stuff here! Enjoy!
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