Proquest/ Lesson 5

Proquest certainly has scholarly articles on medical conditions. I think that they are helpful but most likely beyond the average laypersons comprehension. Of course that would be up to them to decide but just warning that the ones I searched were scholarly articles. I researched Pena Shokier's syndrome. This is a little known recessive genetic trait that can be passed on to children. I know someone that lost two baby sons with this condition. I also searched Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. 

I also looked for articles on Thompson Square the country music duo that recently sang at the Sanford Premier Center. Typing in Thompson Square produced many articles including the words Thompson or Square so then I typed it in quotes and got the results that I wanted. 
It was also interesting to search topics in specific areas. 

Library Journal has full text articles starting in 1996 to the present. If any library was presented with a book challenge they could get the book review through Proquest.

I checked several blogs and some stated they had looked at other blogs on Diabetes, PTSD and others. Some bloggers did not really say what they had personally looked up.  

Lesson 4 - SIRS Discoverer and SIRS Issues Researcher

I was not familiar with SIRS Discoverer. I had not really ever used it before. This would be a great resource for our "Question of the week" that we have at the library. We can pose a question and then have the student look up the answer on SIRS.

I can think of several times that students had an unusual request for information. We would have been able to find more information for them and/or show them how to find the information that they needed had I taken this challenge earlier!

Opossum Facts, pictures, articles:Wow, lots of great info with nice easy to use formats. It was nice to see the reading levels (color coded) and lexile levels and you could quickly see if it had graphics available.
Did you know that when baby opossums are born they are less than one inch long. Yes, they are only about the size of a grain of rice. A mother opossum is nature's minivan!
Opossums have 50 teeth, that is more than any other North American land mammal.



I also looked at the leading issues link under database features. This had very interesting pro/con information on topic such as smoking, tanning salons, cyberbullying and junk food.

Current events was interesting.

I looked up information on Pakistan on the country facts section.

SIRS Issues Researcher: The Pro/Con leading issues again listed here with issues more pertinent to older students. Lots of current news articles and links. Since this has many points both pro and con it would make a great site for debate students.

I looked over the curriculum pathfinder and looked under Civics. Several states are considering adopting a policy that high school graduates have to answer most of the questions on the Citizenship test in order to graduate from high school.

Learning express

Learning Express:

The testing area was informative. The score my test section told how many questions completed, skipped, correct and incorrect. The view answers was helpful to evaluate where the mistakes were and what level a test taker is at. Additional resources to build skills were available.
I had forgotten how much information and how many types of practice tests are available.
I added two career resources to my center. You can complete part of the tutorial and when you save it the date, time and how much completed shows up and you can resume it at any time. The tutorial seem to give you all the information to create what you need such as a cover letter for a resume.

I also found information on exploring career choices, salary ranges, etc.

I looked at an eBook for a nursing assistant and was able to read that online in a PDF format.

Lesson 2

Chilton's Online: Found my 2008 Acadia and looked at the recalls, bulletins, maintenance schedule and repair area. I did not realize that they had technician test prep quizzes available so learned a lot about Chilton's today.

Mango Language: In order to help the Vietnamese student we would choose the English language and then choose English for the Vietnamese speaker. 
Tried some French lessons. This is a great way to try something new and it would be a great way to learn a few phrases before a trip. They only thing I could say that would be negative is that when it shows the lesson there are the blue arrows for the lessons and then the arrows below change the lessons to the next lesson and I started by choosing the wrong arrow and at first was not sure why the lesson was not starting then I saw the bigger blue arrow above that actually started the lesson!
It would be nice if you could see a video overview of the program and not have to join a webinar.
Actually, Mango is a really cool database overall. I also noticed that apps are available for your phone!

  TumbleBook Library

Tumblebooks: Tumblebooks is another fun resource. We would promote this to all children, mothers with preschoolers and grandparents for their grandchildren. I looked at some puzzles and games.
The kids today are used to so much movement. I actually get tired of seeing all the movement on the pages of the picture books.
The audio portion of the chapter books would be good to use with our tutoring students. It was nice to sort by reading level. This is a great site.

lesson1b & 1c

Today I looked at the public library World Book Online for kids.  It appears to me to be exactly like the student edition of World Book Kids with a slightly different layout.  World Book Infofinder seemed to be like World Book Student just a different layout.
The games and spotlight information would be interesting and fun for the kids.

World Book Reference Center: I tried the... hear text read aloud feature, it was interesting but I did not really like it. I was looking at France and sometimes it spelled out the word or pronounced it incorrectly. It sounded computer generated so some room for improvement here. Again, this site is packed with information and would be very useful to homeschool students as well as mainstream students. I liked the quick links on the left to areas you are interested in. I noticed they can be expanded or collapsed. I liked the interactive boxes with pictures, videos or sounds throughout the article. The related information links on the right are interesting. So much information is available.

The interactive Earth was pretty neat.
One of the overview links did not work in the public library lesson.

World Book Foreign Language: The visual pictures made navigation easy. The read aloud portion could be beneficial to our ESL Spanish students and those students wanting to learn Spanish.

SD Library Challenge for electronic resources/Lesson 1a

World book Kids and World Book Student:
Getting a late start... but today I viewed the World Book Kids and World book Student. I looked up bears and found that the kids version had good but basic information, it was simple to use and also had some short videos available. I liked the link at the bottom that took me directly to World Book Student for more information. The student version had more information, a nice table of contents on the left side. I have listed below some of the optional information that I found :

• dictionary results
• related articles
• additional websites
• videos, pictures, sounds
• maps showing where different types of bears list
• "how to cite" the article information with various styles
• tables with more information about bears. 

Did you know that some scientists think that bears hibernate but some scientist think that bears are not true hibernators because a bear's body temperature does not drop like other animals that hibernate. Bears also wake fairly easily and will become fairly active on a warm winter day. These scientists use such terms as "winter lethargy" or "incomplete hibernation" to describe the bear's sleep period.

Europe, Asia, Alaska and Western Canada are some of the most populated bear habitats. Polar bears live in the Arctic. Black bears can be black, black with white patches on the chest, brown, cinnamon, blue-gray, and blonde.
I did find one link to a bear cam on a National Geographic web site that was no longer a good link.


World Book Advanced.
I used the country of France and wow....you could literally spend hours researching all the possible articles. This would be a great spot to "save to your research" if you find things that you wanted to use or find again. I noticed the online books as well as articles and tons of other resources. 

World book Discover- A few clicks in and I found American government. This would also be a great site for saving to your research. Read-aloud and different languages would make this great for all types of learners. I liked the video tutorial for World Book Discover to give a nice overview of the resource.