Lesson 6: Gale Virtual Reference Library

Basic Discovery

Getting to Know the Titles:

The volume I selected was World War II Reference Library. Once I selected it the next page was a standard table of contents. Off to the right was a drop down menu that gave the viewer additional selection. In the World War II reference library one of those selections was primary sources. I clicked on primary sources but I couldn’t seem to get it to work. I suspect only certain parts of the volume have primary sources.  One of the areas I looked at was the background to the war. This was comprehensive and well written. I really liked the related subject links on the left hand side. These links quickly took the reader to related readings. The navigation was well done. I could see older students using this reference library for many different types of research projects.

Search Term Box:

I researched Global Warming. There were 180 articles found. The results were not the normal results you would find using a typical search engine. The results were right on topic. They were from multiple different sources and gave the reader a range of articles to investigate the topic. My results included selection like Global Warming from Pollution A to Z, Global Warming from the Dictionary of American History, and Global Climate Change form UXL Encyclopedia of Water Science. This gives the researcher multiple perspectives for investigating one topic. I chose the global warming article in the Dictionary of American History. This article laid out the history of the Global Warming debate from its earliest beginning in 1824 when French scientist Jean-Baptiste Fourier first describes the earth atmosphere as a green house.

The listen feature is the same as SIRS Discoverer listen feature. It is an electronic voice that reads the entire text. The nice feature is it highlights the sentence that is being read. A blue box moves along with each word being read. The reader can easily follow along. This feature works much better than the one found in World Books for Kids.

Searching Other Blogs:

I guess many people are like me and are a little bit behind. I found the Faith Library blog and the author results were similar to what I found. I agree with the author on the difficulty with Gale Virtual Reference Library is narrowing down a search.

Common Core Connections

I did my search on “Critical Thinking”. I ended up with 47 results. Many of these results were not informative. Many of them documents that describe different countries educational systems which listed critical thinking as an area they focus on. The one article I did select that gave some relative information I found in Science Learning in the Encyclopedia of Education. This article relates to the common core anchor standards for reading:

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

1. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
2. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
3. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

The article discusses how young learners construct theories to help make sense of the world. This theory construction is pervasive in all areas. Currently I have students doing research on a topic of their choice to put in a small PowerPoint presentation. My second and third grade students have difficulty with the note taking aspect of the project. This is one of their first tries at taking notes to use in a piece of their own writing.  Many struggle with organizing their information. They have been exposed to titles and subheadings but in their own research they have to develop their own approach for making use of the features of non-fiction. For many this gives them a new appreciation for these features and improves their reading abilities with non-fiction text. As the Gale Article points out they are engage in developing a theory about the use of text features and they engage with them they alter and expand their theory.