Week 10: Completing the Challenge

It's great that we have so much access to so many databases. I had used quite a few of these before and the past few weeks we have been going crazy with research so our students have been hitting many of these. They know how to access from home as well. I think my biggest discovery was the variety of databases offered within World Cat. I had not used those before and they proved to be helpful. I also enjoyed the ancestry databases.

I will continue to promote the databases with both staff and students. I offer presentations throughout the year and have all the links on my website as well. I also do activities with students at the beginning of the year (sort of a search & hunt activity) using the databases.

Ancestry Library, Heritage Quest and Sanborn Maps

Wow!  I could get lost in time in some of these databases and I did for a while! I have used the ancestry ones before. I had better luck with the Ancestry Library than Heritage Quest with my surname and spent quite a bit of time looking up relatives and ancestors from Germany. Then I couldn't find anything on Heritage Quest but when I switched to my mother's maiden name I found quite a bit again, so now I will have to continue with that when I have more time!

With the Sanborn maps I looked up a few places in Sioux Falls and Madison. Because I'm not from South Dakota and have only live here a short while I'm not real familiar yet with the state. It was still fun to explore the past.

I just noticed the photos and maps link an AncestryLibrary so I hunted again for pictures and downloaded two that I have to ask my dad about to see what connection there is. Very cool, but I must now return to other tasks!

Lesson 8: Learning Express

I have used Learning Express, but it has been quite a while. I checked out some of the different subject areas such as Algebra and Reading Comprehension. Also checked out the citizenship tests and did quite well on the government ones. Looked at some of the Ebooks on vocabulary. There's quite a bit on here. Our students use Learning Express for different kinds of test and subject help so I know it gets used here!

Lesson 6: World Cat and More

I have used World Cat before mostly for cataloging and Ill. I am currently working with juniors and seniors on research projects so I typed in a few authors in both World Cat and OAIster and was able to find books, journal articles, etc. Of course, not all were full text but it does give us some much needed additional options. I will definitely keep this in mind when doing any research.

Lesson 7 ArchiveGrid and CAMIO

I thought ArchiveGrid was interesting--I am not sure how I will use it yet, but it is definitely worth looking at. The Sitting Bull information was pretty basic but I looked at other results for Sioux Indians, Sioux Uprising. I think there are some possibilities for history classes. I did some family research and although I did not find a lot, it might be worth it to look at it more and even contact a couple of libraries. We are currently doing a "People of the Past" project with 6th graders and I did find some worthwhile information for a few projects.

CAMIO was pretty cool. I had never tried this before and I plan on sharing this with art teachers and other teachers as well. I tried different features such as the favorites, slide shows, and create web pages. I hope our teachers will make use of this!