PebbleGo is a great resource for starting research in younger elementary classrooms as well as students who struggle with reading in upper grades. PebbleGo allows students who may not be readers to hear the information they are researching read aloud to them. It can be accessed through the AVL elementary school tab. I have used this in my first grade classroom and the version we use allows students to access more topics. For example we used PebbleGo when we talked about biographies before spring break.
My post is on how to access the Oxford Scholarship Online resource using the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL), accessed through the link provided for non-resident JSU students.
Oxford Scholarship Online provides access to over 17,000 publications of the Oxford University Press. The site and its publications cover the gamut from texts suitable for children, to challenging for those with terminal degrees. The site may be used by digitally literate children age 10 and older.
The "Press," began informally in 1478 with the first book published at the University. Through the centuries the press, a department of Oxford and the largest university press in the world, has had as its mission to advance through its publications "the University's objectives of excellence in scholarship, research, and education." Content is available in over twenty-seven different subject areas, representing the best in scholarship, by Nobel prize winners, and others recognized as preeminent in their field.
The resource provides access to book abstracts, chapter summaries, bibliographic information, academic citations, and other pertinent information for each of its publications, as well as the capability to print, save, e-mail, and share this content through a variety of social media, and messaging services. Depending on how you access the resource, and what licenses have been purchased by the host, you may have access to all of the content each book contains.
For over fifty years I have purchased, borrowed, or checked out hundreds of their books, enjoying all, and recommending them to others. Whether conducting research, looking for material to aid in instruction, or to assign as reading, Oxford Scholarship Online is a powerful resource, and I hope each of finds the resource of value, and the books it contains companions as you read, use and reference them in the years ahead.
I wish I could have had 30 minutes instead of three to introduce you to "OSO" as it is affectionately called, but that would deprive you of exploring the resource yourselves.
The resource is not consistent when mentioning how many publications are available. Depending on the page it is over 17,000 or 19,000. I have used both numbers.
On one of the last slides, for the captioning, I used "cop" instead of "copy" to fit the caption in.
The resource is well designed with many features the 3-minute length precluded me from discussing. I encourage you to explore it on your own after reviewing this all too brief overview.
This resource is nirvana for readers that are fans of the Oxford Press and its publications.
Finally, I apologize for the crummy sound. I dropped my "Blue" microphone and had to make do with a poor substitute.
Enjoy!
Best regards,
Bob
Gina Glass
Alabama Virtual Library Demo
The data base resource name is ERIC (EBSCO). Its focus is to provide
information such as journals documents, materials, and publications that
relates to education. I chose to look up information for college and
universities because that is the level that I teach. I could use this resource
in the future to come up with lesson plans and activities for my class.
The name of this resource is Gale Onefile - Garden and Horticulture. The focus of this database is to provide quality resources to those with an interest in gardening and horticulture. There are several features this database has to offer, such as: magazine excerpts, academic journals, newspapers, and even images to help you better identify your plants. I think this would be a really great resource for agriculture classes. The recommended age group for this resource could be anywhere from 10-100. I would personally use this resource in my future job as a way for students to learn about the meaning behind specific flowers, as Shakespeare uses different flowers throughout his works to bring an even deeper meaning to literature. I could even use this resource to help decorate my classroom to give it a more "earthy" feel. For example, the magazine article I pulled up my video would be a great place to start to help design floral arrangements for my classroom.
The Encyclopedia of Alabama is a free resource database provided by the AVL, which lets users research topics relating to Alabama's history, culture, geography, and natural environment. This database can be accessed through most of the main headings on the AVL's homepage, from Elementary to Adult Resources. I would recommend this resource to upper elementary through secondary education teachers, as it contains a wide variety of information that can be used at any grade level. As a middle school English teacher, I would have students use the EOA to create a research presentation on famous people or events in Alabama's history. This resource database is an excellent way to teach students about Alabama's past and educate them on our state's cultural significance.
Access Science is a high school resource found on the AVL website. It has a variety of science information such as topics, articles, media, webinars, etc. It is a great website for middle school through college level students, as well as educators looking for science content. As a middle school science teacher I could use this to pull articles on specific topics we are researching, or I could have students pick a science topic and have them search Access Science for information, videos, etc. to support their topic. I also like that it has projects and updated science news all found it one easy to use location.
The resource that I chose for this Screencast is Explora for High Schools by EBSCO. The resource primarily focuses on high school content areas. This database gives students a variety of choices to research based upon the area of content they are exploring. It offers full text documents, infographics, journal articles, and much more depending upon the content that is being researched. In the context of a high school Geometry with Data Analysis course that I currently teach, I believe this resource would be beneficial for students as they are proving theorems and applications in real world fields as well as finding statistical data or representations of data.
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
The Alabama Virtual Library database I selected for the video demonstration is the Gale In Context: Elementary resource. The Gale In Context: Elementary resource introduces elementary students to database searching. The Gale In Context: Elementary database focuses on providing elementary students with age-appropriate videos, charts, news articles, graphs, and much more. The Gale In Context: Elementary database is a great tool to use for classroom projects, presentations, classroom lessons, and workstations. I would recommend these resources for students’ kindergarten through 5th grade. Each year my students create a presentation to share with the class. The presentation topics range from animals, habitats, book authors, and holiday celebrations. In the future, I will use the Gale resources to help students prepare and research for classroom projects. I will also use this resource in a literacy center.
This Video Demo was created around the Britannica Science Library of books for elementary students. Inside the AVL, I found the resource under elementary resources for the Britannica Science Library 2013, which are a set of science books based around various areas of science. These books are very insightful and are on a reading level for students grades 5-12. For my video I used the book about the environment as my example and how easy it is to view or to download for students to have additional information not given in the classroom learning. This is a great resource for students that have interests in specific areas of science that are not satisfied with only the information that may be covered inside the classroom.
I did my AVL video on on the "Points of View Reference Center" tab. I had never used any digital library source before, so I was really blown away by how many resources could be found on this site. I wanted to show this particular resource because this was the most relevant to my class, and it was exactly what I will need for my 10th grade World Literature class assignment next year. The assignment that was given to the kids 4 weeks ago in my class was researching a hot topic of interest, and take a dystopian point of view. Students had to go further and claim if this subject is ignored moving forward what would happen. It took me about three total days of planning to provide students a website link page for each of these topics to help them get started on finding their research. The Points of View Reference Center not only categorized these topics so they would be easy for users to find, it also provides students multiple different outlets on sources they could use for their research like magazines, academic journals, books, biographies, and more.
