Week #6-WorldCat

1. In WorldCat, besides keyword, you can also search by many different categories. Some of them are: Author, ISBN, Musical Composition, Material Type, Subject, Publisher, etc. There are 29 different ways to search.

2. In the Advanced Search using Title Phrase, I searched for Charlotte's Web. There are 2,710 libraries world wide that have this book. The top library in my search was Alexander Mitchell Library in Aberdeen, SD.

3. The Call Number for this books is LC: PZ7.W58277; Dewey: 813. When you click on any of the hyperlinks, you get more related information.

Other FirstSearch Indexes
The access button in the search results for the topic South Dakota gives you access to external websites that could give more information related to your topic. This would probably help to provide more information to the topic that you are searching for.

Week #5-Netlibrary

1. In searching for Columbus Day, I found 3 books. With the books it gave published information as well as price to buy the book. I do not totally understand this site. Do you buy the book and then you own a ecopy of it, or do you borrow the book? I could see this being helpful to find the titles/publishers to books, but I don't foresee a lot of use in our classrooms if we have to purchase the books.

2. In searching for Constitution Day, I found a total of 9 books. A couple of them were Jury Nullifications and Reasonable Doubt, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

3. I was not able to access the publisher's box without a password and user name. I tried what I had, but did not work. This site is much hard to use then the other ones. I do not see much use for this in my classroom.

Week #4-Gale Virtual Reference Library

1. In the Gale Virtual Reference Library I clicked on Endangered Species because this is something that I have my children do a research project on each year in third grade. This will be a great resource for them to use to find some well know and some unique endangered species. I chose the Matschie's Tree Kangaroo as my endangered species because it was an animal that I have never heard of before; I would hope that my students would also take this list and find an unknown species to learn more about. What a great way to expand their knowledge of endangered species. The article I looked at gave great information on the animals: history, the conservation measures that have been taken to save the animal, their habitat, current distribution, description of the animal and the biology of the animal. Their was also information about its classification and pictures of the animal. I can see using this site in conjunction with the World Book Kids sites that I currently have been using.

2. As I searched for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the basic search, I found 4 books with information on this topic, but there was also related information on the left side of the page that you could use. This information gave overviews of the book as well as historical information at the time the book was written. It gave insight into where Mark Twain came up with his characters, settings and plots for the book.

I used the read aloud feature to read the whole article. I thought it would be pretty neat for our visually impaired students, but also for our students who need to work on fluency or that are struggling readers. When I tried to just have it read one section, it would only accept 600 characters at a time. This may have some limitations in the classroom, but still would be a great tool.