World Book Public Library Edition

I tried the World Book Online Kids (grades K-5). This World Book looked a lot more fun than the others. It was very colorful and had games. I do wonder if that would be distracting for a student though. The games would be useful if you went there with that purpose (to play the games). But if you sent your student there to do research maybe they would get off task. But you deal with this in all grades and students need to learn to resist the temptations on the Internet and do their work. I really liked the link to other elephant information. (I looked up elephants again; I wanted to be able to compare to the other World Books.) The websites looked good: PBS and zoo websites. World Book Online Info Finder Right away when I opened the Info Finder I liked that they had a box with options like “How to do research” and “Citation Builder.” Then I started my search for elephants. The article had a lot of good information. Here’s what I like about the World Book: the “Hear text read aloud” option under “tools.” This is great for a lot of students. The “tools” section also has an option that students can easily save articles. On the left side were the main sections of the article, this is good for scanning the article for what you are looking for. World Book Online Reference Center Here, I searched for the United Kingdom. There was a typo and I ended up searching for “Unites Kingdon” and I was disappointed that there was no information. Am I just too used to spell check pulling up the answer for me? Or, am I used to Google asking me if this is what I meant, and supplying me with the alternative? Either way, I didn’t like this. Students frequently misspell things. Well, I found my mistake and fixed it. (Maybe that is better for students, what if they had been spelling this wrong their whole lives and now because it wasn’t “auto-corrected” for them they’ve learned how to spell it correctly.) What I like best about the World Book overall (so far) is that they give you the citation. So many students make mistakes with their citation and World Book is just saying, “Here it is, take it!” ~Common Core~ Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism. Using World Book Online Reference Center I looked up the Dust Bowl. I was surprised to see a video clip along with the text and pictures. I liked it because it was short (19 seconds) with narration. Students would be able to use the video clips and pictures to describe (in writing) what they are seeing.