Lesson 1a

Prairie Dogs

Starting out with the World Book School Edition research, I discovered the following:              Since I am from the big city, I decided to do a little research on the infamous prairie dogs.  It was interesting to see the difference in the information on the World Book Kids and World Book Student.  The Student version gave more detailed explanations of the types of prairie dogs and allowed me to actually listen to the sound of a prairie dog (which was cool!).  The World Book Kids was more user friendly because of the picture clues available for locating what you want, such as "world of animals".  But the research helps that were available on the Student version would be better for writing actual reports as the student advances in school.  I liked the ability to be able to toggle back and forth to other editions of the World Book by simply going to the bottom of the page.

Mr. Smith!

 Because of my love of the Alexander McCall Smith series set in this country, I hunted down the information on Botswana in the Advanced World Book.  I found it interesting to look at the Presidential papers regarding the country, but I would imagine that the information found when clicking on the actual country of Botswana would be more beneficial for a patron doing a research paper.  It provided the facts and they were clearly listed by type of info on the left hand side.  I especially liked the clear instructions as to how to print only a subsection of the entire article for Botswana, because sometimes that is difficult for a student to do when they only want one part of a big mess of info.

Busy Bees in their Washington hive!

In the World Book Discover, I found it easy to access government, but then had to think a bit before I actually figured out how to find American Government.  That wasn't as easy as it probably could be done.  Or maybe I'm a bit clueless.  But I did get into it and read the article on School Prayer.  Then I had fun translating it into several different languages as offered clearly in the left hand side options. I would think that the translation tool and the pictures would help those who have difficulty with English, as well as the short concise articles that are provided.