I searched the Fraser Valley Regional Library and found that it had all of the resources our school district has paid for as well as many, many more. Some of the more interesting databases that our school district doesn’t have but the public library does are:
Middle Search Plus – provides access to full-text articles for more than 140 popular middle school magazines.
Academic Search premier - Search for full-text articles in more than 4,500 journals, and 3,700 peer-reviewed titles in this multi-disciplinary database.
Canadian Newsstand – Read current and archived full-text news from 219 major and rural Canadian Newspapers.Canadian Student Research Centre - Search by keyword or topic to find useful information and subjects that matter to Canadian secondary students.
Oxford Reference Online - Search bilingual dictionaries, quotations databases, maps and illustrations, timelines and more.
GreenFILE - Search content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and more.
KnowBC - Search readable and authoritative information on all of the significant British Columbia people, places, and things.
Funk and Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia.
These resources might be very useful for our students to use. I explored a variety of them and they look good, especially for middle school and high school students. One of the better resources I found for younger students (I teach grade one) is Searchasaurus (which both the school and public libraries have). The reason why I liked this tool is because you can select the readability level for your searches which is very handy for younger students. The text can also be read aloud to you but I found the voice to be rather choppy and the inflection was off making the text a bit more difficult to understand. This would be good for older students who perhaps can focus better and connect the pieces a little better, but it would be difficult to listen to a longer piece of writing using this. I am sure that this technology will improve in time. I think that these resources have the potential to be the building blocks for developing good research skills. In addition to using the online resources that our school district offers, I would definitely encourage all of my students to get a public library card and I would like to teach them how to find and use these resources from the public library so that they have access to these resources once they leave school.
Before the end of the course, make sure you go to Weblinks and explore the ORC from AB. if only because of the vetting.
ReplyDeleteFurther, you have to be quite careful with Searchasaurus. It can be very good on some limited topics, but EBSCO has not spent as much money an time on the "primary years" material in their databases.