Encyclopedia Britannica

Once upon a time I used to flip through the encyclopedia for fun.  My personal preference was for World Book.  I loved the blue covers.  Every once in a while I would flip through a different encyclopedia, like Britannica.  I wonder if children have that same experience now.  Do they like flipping through the atlas too? (That...may have just been me.) 

Today I am going to be looking through the school edition of Britannica that is part of Maine's MARVEL database system. I started with clicking on the Britannica Learning Zone aimed at children PreK to grade 2.  The sound that came out of the computer startled me!  Just so you know, the words on the screen are also read out loud.  I liked that the lesson pointed us to the guides, but it was a little annoying that I had to log into the MARVEL system before seeing it.  I think it could be quite fun to use with children, although I couldn't find the teacher guides.  The guide didn't seem to say how to get to it specifically.  I myself enjoyed the coloring section quite a lot.  This section was not the focus of the lesson, however.

Image from Britannica online here

The animal I chose to look for was the manatee.  I love these gentle giants.  The elementary section let me either go straight to the article or look at photographs.  Manatees tend to live in rivers or along the coast.  When I think of manatees and their habitats, I think of Florida and the poor creatures getting cut up by passing motorboats.  This type of manatee is the Caribbean manatee. I forget that there is also the Amazonian and African manatees. In the section aimed at the middle school age, the photographs and other media are exactly the same, but the information in the article goes further in depth and generally is more scientific in tone.

Our instructions for the high school level of Britannica were to look up a country.  I chose Tonga, the country I did an in-depth project on in sixth grade. Next, we were supposed to look at the right-hand column on the results page and see which would be the most useful for our patrons.  With Tonga, it was easiest to see which would be the least helpful: primary sources and ebooks!  There were no results at all.  Websites and journal articles would be the most helpful, which would be my guess for what would be the most helpful for my patrons as well.  The workspace feature would also be very useful, because they could save all their information to one section without necessarily having to email it to themselves or downloading it all to their computer.  Then, they could easily switch between their home computer and school computer to work on the project at any given time.  I think that having to create another password can be difficult for people, but I chose to keep it simple and rather insecure.  I think that would work fine for most projects though.