Question about all or nothing offer with the online databases is apparently a hot topic. My understanding is that it is $1.65 / FTE in your district is pretty steep when only our high school has used them. 5800 x 1.65 = $9,570 per year when our Teacher-Librarians have shared with me that NPSS is the only school that has used either Worldbook or EBSCO in the past, cancelled worldbook recently, and few used EBSCO. Students have access through their public library card to EBSCO and all librarians have a public library card.
Presentation talked about students ability, or lack thereof, to effectively search using tools online, how do they collect the information, the time spent by students reading a website (pretty short time, low depth of investigation, focus on top only). Students are not using the internet for homework, they are not being assigned assigned projects conducive to using the internet, not being assigned projects at all, and are not using the we in a knowledge creating manner.
Searching is covered in the ICT learning outcomes, do we need to pay for something that searches better or should we not teach our students to search more effectively?
Kevin Ford from World Book continued on with their presentation. They used GoTowebinar (a citrix product) to do a walk through with one of the staff from Chicago. Site is set up either through IP authentication or username and password. Worldbook does have some very nice search features for kids, but there are many free places for this as well that include lesson plans, safe searches that teachers can find and use. Does one central solution warrant the cost?
www.worldbookonline.com/student has very good search results and at the bottom of the page there are links to Educators tools which find how content is linked to the BC curriculum. This is a very nice feature. I can get in at SFU, so they must be paying for this or is it open? Looking at the biography section for political leaders in Canada it has specific leaders but not biographies on all. These are written by staff at Worldbook and must have some selection process that apparently happens twice a year. My concern that I shared is that Canadian elections occur in a span of one month and this is not a good resource for current events.
Between National Geographic, Britannica (which appear to be both free), as well as CBC, and BBC I believe there are more than enough quality, free sources online for our secondary schools. WWP uses some specific search engines that are kid friendly that are free as well.
EBSCO Host
Presented their database offerings, there is resources for everyone at general and advance secondary, elementary, middle, and T-L’s, Teachers and Admin. Strength of EBSCO is in negotiating rights with publishers to aggregate content behind a search interface. High quality content, published articles, videos, sound, SWOT analysis, images, books, etc. I would support a purchase of EBSCO since it is a database collection rather than only articles created by staff.
http://trial.ebscohost.com
UserID: ebsco
Password: erac
Can be set up at an IP level, login/password (for home use)
Something that was mentioned in both parts of the presentation was that everything is really simple… the problem is how do we get the information out effectively to everyone and help them get to the point that they are feeling that it really is simple. With the massive amount of resources it is really easy to only see the forest and not focus in on one tree.