Newspapers and Maine Newsstand

Do a basic search on something of interest to you. Report your findings and observations.

I began by looking up global water issues. I loved how it gave me many suggestions as I typed. I found many more articles than I could read (1512384) and most were quite non-technical. I liked how I could sort on the right side of the page,. So I decided to look only at magazine articles. This got me down to 6163 articles. I further limited my search by choosing only feature articles. This gave me suggestions for Subject searches and I chose International AND water resources” I found plenty to interest me, but didn’t think this would be the best way for a student researching to narrow their search when they were trying to find specific information on the future of water issues in a global economy.

I then decided to try an advanced search. I used the ability to look up subject terms and after some experimentation found that “global warming” and “water policy” were two ideas I was interested in.  This time I found 23 results, Limiting further to the last 3 years, I found only 3 results. One of those three results was a story about a protest against an electric utility increasing its coal-burning capacity. The entire article only mentioned water once. I was curious to see why  this article would have been listed with “water policy” as a subject. As it turns out, the subjects listed did NOT include” water Policy” but instead included “energy policy,” not the subject I had requested at all. In my courses in database searching, I was taught that a subject-level search was a very efficient way to limit searches to remove articles that were not of interest. I am discouraged to learn that Proquest Newspapers magazine search doesn’t work this way.

I tried to use  the Science Search and was dismayed to learn that my subject headings restricted my search to ASFA: Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts. It would have been nice if there had been something less technical 

Save this search to perform again or create an alert which will let you know when something new is added that fits your search criteria.

I was able to save my search, but unable to create an alert (at least I got no confirmation when I told it to create) and when I tried to set up an RSS feed, I was not given a url to paste into my RSS feeder. I did get a message that a server error had occurred and that I should "contact us if the problem persists." However, I couldn't easily find information on who I should be contacting. In the past, when I've wanted to contact someone concerning Marvel issues I've looked at the ME-LIBs archives for contact information. I believe it's also on the Miaine State Library website. Is this what we're expected to do? The message seems to indicate that we should be contacting ProQuest.

Choose at least one other Invitational blog, read that person’s post (about this or a previous lesson), and comment on it.

I had difficulty commenting on several blogs- especially those using WordPress.  I couldn't find a way to comment on Mary 04001 - there didn't seem to be a comment button enabled. I did manage to comment on other Blogger blogs, and most of the comments I left involved the way I manage to figure out what the CAPTCHAs say.

 Report how many patrons/users/members you have helped find the information they need using this or any other MARVEL resource.  Blog about an experience you had showing a patron how to use MARVEL.

I've recently moved to a new school library and haven't had an opportunity to show Marvel to anyone. I'm rather discouraged about this, as I've been unable to get teachers excited about coming to the library at all. I have shown some elementary schools tudents how to use Britannica learning Zone and they seemed to love it. I wish there was a way to get Internet connections into students' homes as I expect that these students would use it at home. In the past, at my previous school, I had a lot of success showing Academic Search Complete, Annals of American History,  Gale Literature Databases, Nature, ProQuest Newspapers, Wall Street Journal, World Data Analyst, and WorldCat.

In August, I had the opportunity to show the Marvel Resources to preK through 8th grade teachers during an in-service training. They were particularly impressed with the ability to do Lexile-related searches in the Primary Search, Middle Search Plus,and Student Research Center.

Week One continued - Britannica's Teacher Resources - Don't Miss These!

I think I've finally found the gold on Britannica School Edition

The entry page for the three versions has a Teacher Resource Section at the bottom of the page

The Curriculum Materials are wonderful

You can search for standards from your state and find lessons that support them. Some of the lessons are tied to Britannica materials and others are not. There's a lesson to use with any Britannica Country page that would work well for my students. The web links come from sites like the National Endowment for the Humanities Edsitement, The Council for Economic Education's Econedlink, and others. It's like Britannica really did find the best of the Web here.

The current Maine Standards are there,  but there's also a Common Core Link.

I just found my new nest friend.

For an example try this link for 9th graders learning to make judgments about conflicting findings

Week One - Brittanica and the Armadillo

• nine-banded armadillo. Photograph. Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. 8 Oct. 2012.  <http://school.eb.com.ursus-proxy-9.ursus.maine.edu/elementary/art-87084>.

I'm trying out the School version of Britannica. The elementary version is very easy to use. I looked up "armadillo" and there's a picture on the main page. I can scroll over the picture to enlarge it (a little at a time) and I can picture students enjoying this feature. At first, I didn't notice the links to the other images, but they're actually quite easy to spot.
Regarding habitat, I learned that they live mainly in central and South America, with one species in North America. Most live "in open areas" while one species lives in forests. I thought this could have included more information, as elementary students would have been exposed to words like desert, rain forest, and grassland.
There was one link to another EBSCO database, but students would find this very confusing as it was a review of several books and had no information that an elementary student would know what to do with. Perhaps a middle schooler would find it useful, but I doubt it.

The Middle School version had even less information on the armadillo's habitat stating, "It makes its burrow in the dry soil of arid regions."  National Geographic's website gives the same information, but also includes that armadillos live in rainforests, grasslands, and forests.Clicking the images link shows the same nine images as the Elementary version shows.

The middle school version had 1265 words compared with 1063 words in the elementary version. Additinal information in the middle school version included that armiadilos are piglike, their armor is "bony" and protects them from cactus and enemies and looks like medieval armor. I, frankly, didn't think that the amount of useful information was any greater in the middle school version than in the elementary version. The information was slightly different, but didn't seem to address questions that either group would be asked to look up for a school project.

Burkina Faso

In Britannica High School I searched for Burkina Faso

The right side bar of the results page includes population, area, a "quick facts" link, a link to articles, a link to the web's best sites, and a link to further reading.

The articles:

The lexile filter  did not seem to work. It claimed that 64 of 71 articles had a lexile score between 250 and 300, yet most of the articles were from professional journals such as the Pakistan Journal of Biological Sciences.  I believe that many of my high school students could read these articles, yet those with lower reading levels could not. I think this feature would be most useful for Advanced Placement or Honors classes that were interested in getting a feel for the country. Just skimming through the articles I discovered that Burkina Faso has many health problems not seen in developed countries, but is quickly entering the developed world as evidenced by articles on credit cards and film festivals.

The Website Links

Seven of the "best of the web" links also come up in the first ten results of a Google search for Burkina Faso. Many of the others had very little information that wasn't found in the quick facts page or more easily found by reading the article. I did, however, like crwflags for any students who are researching a country's flags. Others that didn't show up on the first page of Google results didn't offer much if any) extra information.

Additional Reading

The books listed under additional reading are not books that are readily available to us, so I don't see this as being a useful addition. Most of the books are outdated and only available through universtiy libraries, though UMaine had a couple.

My Opinion

The article, itself, is the most useful part of Britannica for high school students.

The Workspace

While I believe the workspace could help students who need assistance with organization, I don' t envison most of my students using this. Most of our students are accustomed to working in Google Docs, so they are most likely to save information there. They also have a dificult time remembering passwords and usernames, so I see this as just one more challenge. I would like to hear, however, form anyone who's found a useful hook or way to get students to save information in the online workspace. I'd love to know how you got them to use it.

Britannica and Primary Sources 

After reading other blogs on the high school version of Britannica I wondered about the primary sources people were blogging about. The main page for Burkina Faso had no mention of primary sources. So I did some digging. I clicked on more multimedia and found a link to primary sources that siad that they could find no primary sources for my spelling of Burkina Faso, but gave sources from similar spellings. These source had nothing whatsoever to do with Burkina Faso and would frustrate my students to a great extent. I suppose it's good that these were well hidden on the site.

Everything has gone well so far, except that I couldn't hear the audio on the first tutorial - wondered if it was even there?

One thing I'm hoping to learn out about Marvel, but I'm not sure if they're part of the training:

• Is it allowed to make a school account so that our younger students whose parents don't want to make accounts can use the school account to log in from home? Log-in and password information would, of course, not be advertised anywhere on the web.