1.
While using the World Book Online Kids for grades K-5, I first chose the Games
link. I love the bright colors and eye-catching
pictures on this site! The games were on
a spinning picture real with the title of the game. By clicking on each game, it often gave
choices for easy, medium, and hard levels or after a level was completed, you
could stay at the same level or move to the next one. This would be perfect for a wide variety of
ages. The audio instructions that went
along with the written instructions would be great for children that are not
yet able to read or for the ones that are just learning to read. The puzzles, mazes, and the color by numbers were
great fun and it was easy to move around in the site. I’m hooked.
I went back
to the home screen and chose the Activities link next. The many activities were divided into the
categories: think it, be it, make it, and teach it. Just by looking at the titles, I can see
several things that would be useful for our children’s programs. Each activity has step by step
instructions, a list of what you need for the activity, and pictures as well as
the options to print, save, hear text read aloud, email, and translate the text
into one of several different languages.
In the “teach it” section, it also lists the national standards for each
activity
2.
While using the World Book Online InfoFinder for grades 5-9, I chose the “Interactive
Earth” feature. It gave me the choices
of Interactive Maps, World Book Atlas, Explore USA, Explore Canada, Explore the
World and Outline Maps and Flags. After
choosing to explore USA, a large map of the USA was shown with the outlines of
the different states that then linked to a resource guide for each state. I chose South Dakota and was linked to a page with a beautiful
image of the black hills and several choices for articles on South Dakota’s
biographies, cities, Colleges and Universities, economy, history, land and
climate, national park system, Native American groups, monuments and historic sites,
plant and animal life, and other related articles. It also gave a choice of viewing the
curriculum correlations to the content standards for grades K-12 in the 4 main
subject areas. This would be very useful
for teachers. There were also several
related books to read and study skills information. Some of the articles included pictures, maps,
tables, and videos. Each article also
featured specific information for how to cite the article if using it as a
resource, as well as the options to print, e-mail, save, translate, and hear
text read aloud. These options would all
be very useful for students both in and out of the classroom when doing
research. These would be a great help to
our homeschooled students and families. I
would recommend this site to students who do not have computers or who are
looking for a little bit more information than what they have gotten from the
books on the shelf. I also found some
very useful tools to recommend on the homepage such as creating your own
timelines and the citation builder.
3.
While using the World Book Online Reference Center
for grade 9 through adults, I found many of the same wonderful tools that were included
in the previous versions as well as quick links back to these sites. Once I
was on the eBooks Center page, I was given the choices of looking for ebooks by
author’s last name, title, genre, language, and format or by simply typing in
the search box. Some shorter books are simply displayed for
you while the longer ones such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” have the
choices of downloading the book in ePub
or Mobi versions along with the usual printing, saving, emailing, translating
and hearing options. There are also sections on how to cite the document, content
standards, related encyclopedia articles, back in time articles(which showed 25
articles), and 6 related websites. These
tools would be helpful for patrons who are looking for more associated
information. The left side of the page shows the document
contents by chapters also. This would
make it very easy for patrons to move around the books if needed.
