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.
Yes, as you noted, the World Book Public Library version and the School version are very similar--just different layouts. Since the Challenge started, World Book Kids has moved to a new platform and there is no difference between the school and public library version; WB Student and Advanced also moved to new platforms but the Public Library counterparts did not.
ReplyDeleteI've shared World Book with home school groups before and they have been very excited to learn about it.
Thanks for your post,
Julie