Online Research Databases - Reliable Research Info in a Click

When MIA, I have been learning more about online research databases and giving workshops around the Lower Mainland. We have access to a couple of fabulous, reliable online research databases. World Book Online, EBSCO Research Databases, and the Encyclopedia of British Columbia Online. World Book offline you are familiar with, but there a lot of extras in the online version. World Book has incorporated primary source documents, maps, timelines and e-books. World Book has also incorporated Canadian Sources. I was very pleased to see among the 24 Canadian e-book titles Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver and Robert Service's The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses.

EBSCO Research Databases include 1,750 periodicals, 8,300 journals, 100,000 primary source documents, 300,000 photos, maps and flags and 520 full text education journals. The Canadian Student Reference Centre has full text for many magazines as well as thousands of historical essays and biographies. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator. It also includes over 100,000 primary source materials and more than 300,000 images.

For teacher reference, EBSCO includes over 260 titles of teacher and administrator journals, periodicals, and books covering education topics such as Assessment, Continuing Education, Current Pedagogical Research, Curriculum Development, Instructional Media, Language Arts, Literacy Standards, Science & Mathematics, and more.

Access in the school is automatic. Drop by the library for the passwords for at home access - our license allows for this.

Please encourage our students to go beyond Google and Wikipedia to use these databases - make it an assignment requirement. It will be databases such as these our students will be accessing in post secondary education and at the public library.

I'd be happy to come and do an intro lesson with your class - fyi all the grade 8's become familiar with World Book Online during orientation.

Check out the video about Online Databases, you might recognize a few familiar faces... our students were great... I'm not a fan of being on camera;)