Lesson #3

1. As I went into this data base there is a wealth of information on the first screen.  I just had my 6th graders here last week and we looked up the Spotlight of the Month, Maps of the World and went to the Kids Corner.  From there we went to the Things to Make and do and I had them find an activity.  That was fun to find something they could do.  I also was not real sure how the Lexile score worked so I went to help and found the answer to that.  There was so much good information here also.  A person could spend many hours just on that first screen.

I then put in armadillos and spent some time there.  I found by article #14 there was not much information about the animal even though it said there were 84 articles.  Out of those first 14 articles 10 of them had pictures even some of them were not real clear.  The first article had nice pictures.  If I had a choice I would send students to the World Book for better pictures.

There were no web find sites and some of the articles were 10 years or older.  There were some newer ones but the first article (which I think of as usually one of the better articles) was a 2003 article. 
I went down further on the list and looked at an article called Roach and found the word armadillo only once but it was higlighted and I found out that armadillo eats raoches.  This tells me that every time any kind of article uses the word armadillo it will come up in the reading list.  Article #42 was really a stretch, they were using a mock introduction where someone was introduced to an armadillo.

There was a wide variety of lesile levels to choose from. 

2.
     a. I went back to Africa and then went to Togo again.  There was a map and a flag and a set of boxes with informative little topics.  In order to get more information I went to Learn More About Togo and there were some longer articles with more information.  It depends on how much information a student needs as to if I would send them to this site.  I found it harder to get around in than some other sites. 
     b. I was impressed with the amount of maps available.  I went into the US Historical maps and this had 1000 maps by itself.  All the different dates were so interesting.  I went into 1450 with the Native Trade Networks.  This would be helpful for a student doing work on a Native project.  I was amazed at all the different kinds of maps: economic, cultural, language and that was all just on the first page.  I found this one easier to get around in than the "Country Facts".  There would just be many ways that a student could use this section.  Some of this imformation could even be used for an economics paper.
    c. I picked Fiction because I just wanted to know what was in that.  I found a lot of cute little stories that I could use for story time.  I went into several of the different topics just to see what the stories were like.  I could see going here to enlarge my reading selection.  Sometime I am going to go back and go into all of those "Database Features" because they are interesting to look around in. 

SIRS Issures Researcher:

1. There are so many issues to pick from.  I selected a new article on Distracted Driving.  I felt there was a lot of information in this selection.  The first things I looked at was the defination and that was excellent.  Since this is a newer article I thougth it was good to give a defination so everyone knew excatly what these are going to be talking about. 
     a. The Research tools:
         The topic Overviews addressed Technology off all kinds and how it had touched society.  There were 8 subtopics and one of the eight was about distracted driving. 
         The Timeline was interesting but very broad. 
         The Global Impact was again very general technology information.
         The Statistics had graphs and charts again just general technology.
         My Analysis was information to help you organize any kind of topic.
         Note Organizer.  I liked this page because it is helpful in organizing the information.  You can type right into the boxes which could be very helpful to a student.  A student that has trouble organizing information could really make good use of this feature.  Reminded me of using notecards. 
     b. In just looking through the articles I felt they related very well.  I went through 2 screens and they were still directly related to the information that I was looking for.  The reading levels were higher and the articles were various lenghts.  Since this is a topic that teens would be involved with I would expect the reading level to be higher. 
         For a student that was doing a debate the Pro and Con section is very useful.  In that box it has articles that were related to either side so you did not have to hunt through the entire listing to find the kind of article you need. 

2.  I had never been to this part of SIRS and found it very interesting.  This wold be a good place to send a 7th grade class to help them see what they are going to have to take in order to head down various paths in career planning. 
     I went into the Language Arts and checked the first topic American Literature. This took me to an article that had a full text edition of the book with reviews of the book and illustrations that went with the book.  If this book was an assignment the student could find it here without having to purchase the book plus get extra information about that book. 

There is just so much information in these data bases that it blows me away.  I think the hardest thing is knowing just what excatly the student is looking for so that you send them on the right path. A lot of  time can be wasted looking in the wrong place, just because of the vast amount of thing to choose from.