World Book Online

World Book School Edition
Although I have used this edition the most, it continues to surprise me! When I opened World Book Kids for this lesson I was immediately drawn to the World Of Animals video clip. Clicking enter and then filter I checked out the mammals and decided to pursue the black-tailed prairie dog. I found a few facts with the photo and then choices to go to the exhibit or article. The exhibit contained quick facts, related photos, and web links. But the best part was the Compare Animals feature. I selected guinea pig, clicked on Compare Now, and had an instant side-by-side chart. (Guinea pigs are actually raised to eat in parts of South America! Well, I've been told that prairie dog stew is very tasty too.) The article page included three paragraphs of text, related web links (same as the exhibit), a Lexile level, a Play It question, citation information, an illustration, a link to see the article in Spanish, a link to the article in World Book Student, and a toolbox of options (print, email, save, translate this text, hear text read aloud, double click to define a word).

So, on to the trail of the prairie dog in World Book Student... I knew I could arrive through the link in the Kids article, but headed to the home page and entered the term "black-tailed prairie dog" in the search box. My results came up with 1 article, 1 sound, 1 picture and 2 back in time items. In the article itself the amount of information is doubled and is written in more complex terms. The habitat info is about the same, however, Student gives details about the conflict with people and livestock. The related web link is different, a content standards link is included, and tools also include options to highlight the search term and save to My Research. I did the same search selecting the option to search Students and Kids at the same time and came up with the 2 articles, but no link to the cool exhibit stuff in the Kids' World of Animals. Searching just Media didn't find it so I tried Advanced Search and saw that Student is only searching the articles in Kids - too bad - the comparison feature would interest older kids as well.

Leaving the prairie dog behind, World Book Advanced took me to England. Wow - 3074 items, 180 primary sources, 27 e-books, 11 Supreme Court cases and the list goes on! In the article itself the outline on the left links to major topics covered, maps, flag, photos, a fact box, etc. On the right the Related Information links to other information in the encyclopedia as well as out on the web. Here I found an extensive list of biographies which would be great to help students select a topic they may never think of for those 8th grade biography assignments. Also, The World Remembers D-Day is found in Special Reports. I might use this as background reading for a U.S. History class and have them compare/contrast and/or interview relatives and/or neighbors about the Honor Flight program going on in SD right now. Depending on the project, all of this content-rich article would be helpful to students and teachers, plus the content standards link is an added perk for lesson planning.

Lastly, browsing World Book Discover allowed me to start at History and Government, Government, American Government, People, and end up at Coolidge, Calvin. I could then translate, save to My Research, read aloud, email, print, look at the photo, double-click to define a word, etc. All of these features would enable an ELL or IEP student to work independently and locate information needed. If more detail were needed the feature at the end of the article to go to Student would link them to further information there.

Library Challenge: e-Resources Edition

Reviving the old blog to switch trails to Library Challenge: Electronic Resources Edition...

The Game Never Ends: Wrap-up

The "game" has been interesting, fun and very educational. Of course, it never ends! I already have several of the recommended sites in this lesson on my Bloglines. I have made it a daily habit to check Bloglines and will continue that to remain current on library-related info. I know I will continue to apply the info I find there to my work with school libraries in SD. I have also started making time for personal news on Bloglines. I would like to start a school library blog or wiki and will try to work on that soon with Lee and other Library Development staff. Sherlock never really quit his work, he just retired to Sussex to raise bees.So, on with the Web 2.0 game... it's elementary my dear Watson.

Wikis

Wikis had become an everyday part of my life at SDSL even before this lesson! I've been involved in several conversations relating to Wikipedia, participated in the PBWiki about the library's website, checked out and edited conference info on the SDLA conference wiki, joined Quynn's wiki about the Halloween party, and joined the CE Forum wiki. On Friday I visted Carmen Wilcox at Elk Point-Jefferson School/Public Library and she suggested that SD school librarians needed a way to share information and projects in addition to announcements on the listserv - why not a wiki? Why not a wiki for our WUE (weekly electronic updates)? The Library Success Wiki led me to Blogging Libraries Wiki which links to good examples of blogs from all types of libraries, associations, etc. Take a look at this one http://newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com/ which is from a high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago or this one http://casl.wordpress.com/ from the Colorado Association of School Librarians. But back on the trail of wikis, not blogs... The Stevens County Wiki Project would be a great idea for one my local communtities to try out as they are trying to gather info for their 100th year celebration. I e-mailed that suggestion to them. The ideas are endless...

Delicious

Delicious is an excellent and useful Web 2.0 application. The tag cloud on the SDSL page for this challenge caught my eye and then I saw that a few others had included these clouds on their blogs, so I investigated and have been using Delicious for weeks. I have My Favorites organized into folders, but Delicious allows me to use it on any computer and to search by tags. I have used it many times while researching a question for school librarians and on site visits when I needed to get to a site quickly to share information. At first, I was trying to keep a notebook of this info and found it cumbersome and inadequate. Delicious helps me do my job! To expand my use to some of its other services I just subscribed using the tag school_libraries and found 1,353 bookmarks! I think this is going to be a "two pipe problem." This would be a great tool for high school students to use when evaluating websites. (One point of irony... the terms "tags" and "tagging" and the actions associated with them at my former school usually meant you spent some quality time with the principal after expressing your creative talents.)

MySpace

The footprints led up to the falls... but Sherlock was alive and well! As for me, I was not traveling abroad, but in South Dakota and Montana and am now back on the trail of Web 2.0. After taking a look at both MySpace and FaceBook I decided to set up a My Space account. I was curious about it because so many of my former students loved it and it made a lot of news on 20/20. The whole process took only a few minutes and was much easier than setting up a blog. Tom is not my friend, but I did invite one friend, yes, only one friend. I don't see a personal use for this at this time, but liked the teen library stuff I browsed through and think it has great potential for school libraries. However, most schools have blocked all social networking sites. Beebo is another very popular site and students quickly figure out the proxy for it and use it anyway on school computers. Students could create a yearbook type site or even a newspaper style site for schools using this. Oh, it probably wouldn't be as cool then! But the possibilities of linking music and video in addition to photos would be great. The ads are a little too much but can be ignored.

Office 2.0

Web-based is the key to it all! Google Docs was the quickest and easiest of all of the lessons so far. Maybe it just felt that way because bandwidth didn't seem to be an issue. The "any where, any computer" concept I am already in love with, in addition to the sharing. I've been working on a revised school library site visit form in Word so I uploaded it to Google Docs. At first, the formatting was an issue, the logo was unclear, and it produced three pages where I only had two in Word. The Help was easy to navigate, I changed the margins, deleted and re-inserted the logo off the SDSL webpage, deleted the line, and was back in business. Not much of a hassle, but it would have been easier if I had created the document in Docs. Next, I tried a PageMaker document. It first had to be changed to a pdf and when uploaded the font changed. (I have lots of documents in Pagemaker because I used it to create the school newspaper and yearbook at TTS.) The Google Groups caught my eye and I checked out the link to the National Writing Project. They have an interesting writing project in progress for high school students using Google Docs. The South Dakota connection is the Dakota Writing Project at USD. The subgroup Rural Sites Network has some interesting info. As always, I click on one thing and discover a ton more. Office 2.0 would save money and server space for schools and libraries. No more "I forgot to put my file on my memory stick" or "I forgot to e-mail my file to myself" as excuses for uncompleted homework. "I lost my disk or CD" has been long outdated. But there will still be "The internet was down!" I also tried out 30boxes because it was a clever name. The integration of Flickr, etc. is cool, but yet another account to create, another login, and another password...