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.