Lesson 7--Ebooks on EbscoHost (formerly NetLibrary)

 

 

     My students and I have been talking about South Dakota's exports, so I decided to see what Ebooks on EbscoHost had to offer.  I found it easy to navigate, especially with the table of contents listed at the left.  I quickly found a book entitled Foreign Trade of the United States:  Including State and Metro Area Export Data.  Perfect!  Better yet, the data was somewhat recent, with the latest information on South Dakota's exports being from 1999.  I was able to see a detailed table with a breakdown of about 35 export categories by millions of dollars and the destinations by country or by region yearly from 1994 to 1999.  I learned so much in such a short time!  For example, Japan was, by far, our largest export trade partner in 1999 with almost 581million dollars' worth being sent their way.  A surprise to me was that manufactured products exported totaled about 1.1 billion dollars in 1999 while agricultural products totaled about $0.01 billion.  I would have guessed agricultural products to be easily in the lead for our exports.  Since I'm big on my students citing their resources, I clicked on the icon to help me to do that.  It led me to seven different citation formats available for the taking.  To my delight, I was also able to e-mail (from a link on the right side) just the four pages with information on South Dakota to myself.  I'm sold on this one!

 

     In my quest for information on the Constitution for my students, I found quite a few materials that were a little too in-depth for them, so I decided to see what other databases were available to me.  I clicked the one titled "Teacher Reference Center."  I was distracted by all the goodies for teachers. I'll no longer be reinventing the wheel on Constitution Day because there was a wealth of resources out there for me!  Deciding that I had better get back to the task at hand, I changed my database selection to "Middle Search Plus" since I teach middle school.  The selection entitled Did You Know? Monkeyshines on America caught my eye. I think my students would love this one because it would pique their curiosity by bringing up potentially shocking things like the fact that the government can take your private property (provided they pay you for it).  Another one from "Junior Scholastic" was titled "The Fight over the Constitution."  This can be viewed as a pdf complete with color pictures and an inviting layout.  Students could also view it as html with a read aloud option where students can even choose the accent!  A similar, but more challenging article would be "The Deciders" from "Time" magazine, which suggests that Internet and telecom company officials are really the folks who get to decide what is fit to print.  This sounds like fodder for good class discussion!

 

     The advanced search for my class projects on Western history yielded 170 books published by either the University of Nebraska Press or the University of Oklahoma Press.  They have been busy!  I would  not  have thought about limiting my search based on the location of the  publisher, but it yielded much more relevant results than I would have found doing it my way.  My students would have spent way too much time perusing options rather than doing their project.