Final Week

What was my biggest discovery?  Hmmmmm!  Everything was a big discovery for me, but maybe I can narrow it down.  The fact that all the newspapers can be found  online was very exciting because  I have tried to get on some Maine newspapers website and was denied access because I wasn't a subscriber.  I also looked at the entire ProQuest Newsstand  publications and it is huge.  It isn't something that I would use everyday, but it was exciting to discover that it will be there when I need it.

I also loved the Hobby and Craft section. Previous to this course, I had no idea that even existed.  There were so many hobbies and things that I want to explore further; beading, woodworking, photography; I could go on and on.

And last, the health section.  On the internet it is so easy to find unreliable sources, but if you look here, you know that you will find reliable information.

I have several ideas on how to share this information with my colleagues.  Probably the easiest would be to post my discoveries, one at a time, on email so they can  read about what I learned.  You would think that teachers would at least know about Novelist, but they don't.   I  also plan on  writing something for the schools' newsletter each month, so I can inform parents about these valuable resources.  

Thank you for offering this course.  It was fun and I learned a lot.

EBSCO Host

 I looked in MiddleSearch Plus to see if Seventeen was included and it wasn't, so I did a search for Teen and that gave me me Teen magazine and Teen People.  I noticed that there seemd to be many sports magazines, Ski, Skiing, Soccer Digest, etc.  I was surprised that Seventeen was not there.

I did a basic search for "sports and concussions" and had about 5 pages of results.  I noticed that most of the results were from periodicals and many from Sports Illustrated.  I picked an article from Scholastic Choice called The Invisible Injury.  What was really interesting was that you could listen to it with an American accent or British or Australian. There was a Contents box on the left side which included which included Words to Know, Discussion Questions and Test Yourself.   I thought the article contained quite a lot of information, more than I had actually expected.  Looking at the right column I noticed you could add to folder, save cite, etc; but you could also translate the article into many languages.  I tried French just for fun.  I also tried SmartText searching which gave me 987 more hits.

I read a few other blogs and discovered similarities.  One person had the same trouble I did using the elementary  part, it really didn't seem to list periodicals.  Hmmmmm? I know that we were looking in the right place.  The periodicals I found were by entering the name in the search box.

I did my ebook search on alcoholism.  There were a few books that looked very promising, but a few didn't seem to have anything to do with alcoholism.  Surprisingly, it seemed that the two best where "juvenile" literature.  I searched several different ways, alcoholism, alcohol, etc. and the results were much the same.

Doing the search for Constitution Day didn't seem to yield much that was worthwhile.  I added American to the topic and got some books that seemed a little better.  I really didn't find much on this at all.  Maybe Founding Fathers, or The Bill of Rights, or The Constituion of the United States of America.

After putting Nebraska in the publishers box I found 11 books that were published by the University of Nebraska.  There were some interesting books. One that caught my eye in particular was Mountains We Have Crossed, Diaries and letters of the Oregon Mission,  1838.  I can see that by using a State University publisher you might come up with some lesser known interesting titles. I tried putting Maine in with no results and then Massachusetts which gave me University of Massachusetts publications.

Learning Express

I really got sidetracked looking at all the options.  I had to check out each area and see what they contained and then I did a tiny bit of a Excel tutorial.  I think I will use this myself.

But I forced myself to go back and I did the whole 4th grade Math Diagnostic 1 test.  Scored the test and looked at the answers.  This was quite good because it explained how to solve the problem and why the other answers were incorrect. I think showing why the other answers were incorrect is a plus. It also said what skill the problem was testing, for example, place value.

I looked at Goof Proof Interiews  and discovered that it was an ebook.  It looked good, but I wanted a course so I went back and  looked at Career Course; Interview Tips to Get the Job You Want. I started taking the course and was impressed by the information I was getting. I went as far in the course as I could without having to submit anything and found it to be extremely  helpful and practical.   Many of the pages contained bulleted information which I think is so much easier to read than a big paragraph;and you also were given the option of printing the page for future reference. I wish I had taken this before I went on an interview last summer.

I had a hard time getting back to the homepage and finally decided to just logout and re-login. Voila! When I clicked on logout I was taken to the homepage, but I did have to login in again.   I decided to browse all the ebooks rather than do a search and came across The Career Changer's  Manual and added it to My Center.  I spent  good 30 minute or more looking at this.  It was packed with information about changing careers.  Lots of little tests to take to see if you were ready for a change and websites to visit.  Very informative and I will definitely look at this again.