SIRS

SIRS DISCOVERER

Once again I got to click on the alphabetical list to get to another alphabetical list BEFORE I could get to the real SIRS page. Aarrgghhh.

SIRS DISCOVERER 1

ANIMAL: I searched "Wolverine" by subject because I did not want any actors who played characters by that name or any articles related to the Michigan football team.

Nine articles were listed in order by the default criteria (i.e., publication date): 2 at the Challenging reading level; 5 at the Moderate reading level; 2 at the Easy reading level. I was able to list them in order by Lexile or reading level. It was also possible to order them by name of publication or article title. Each listing had the yellow apple icon for subject headings while 7 of the 9 had the camera icon for graphics.

I realize that for this aged audience, short and sweet information is about all they can handle. But I know from a documentary about scientists tracking wolverines, that the very existence of this animal is highly threatened. One or two of the articles were more specific in describing this critical situation. Most others made it sound like wolverines are commonplace and under no pressure.

How can we ever teach students to be citizens who care about preserving animal populations and protecting our environment when they think life is and always will be wonderful because school resources and reports oversimplify everything.

DATABASE: COUNTRY: I selected EGYPT since it is so much in the news now.

I'm impressed by the clean outline of information on this country's page. I like the 3 levels of difficulty in the Graphic Organizers. I think teachers would find those organizers very useful with students

DATABASE: MAPS OF THE WORLD: I selected EGYPT again, as above.

I like the search icons, the specific search box, and the browsable alphabetical icons on the initial MAPS page.

The specific search for EGYPT brought up a list of 17 different maps related to current and past Egyptian history. One map had a link to a pdf file and links to articles related to the information on the map, but not all maps offered these features. I presume that the all the maps could be saved or printed, but I did not want to either save or print the maps on my home computer.

DATABASE: EDUCATOR'S RESOURCES. Here were these four sections of resources: Information Literacy Training Materials (including Citation Guidelines for APA, MLA, and Turabian and a Fair Use Checklist--both very important for me as well as other teachers who care about such practices!); Educator's Guides and Curriculum Support; Student Inquiry and Discovery Activities; and, General Information and Support.

I will be using these Info Lit materials with the classes I teach.

SIRS ISSUES RESEARCHER

WOW...what a list of issues! I'm impressed. I didn't spend a long time on the Researcher homepage but it looked clean and useful with some interesting links.

1: SIRS ISSUES RESEARCHER: LEADING ISSUE: I selected Health Care Reform

Just out of curiousity, I went looking for an article about the latest (second) court ruling against our Health Care legislation. Since the ruling came out only yesterday (Jan. 31), it did not show up. BUt an article about the previous negative court ruling on Dec. 13, 2010 was in the list. The newest article was Jan. 20, 2011.

Once again, the halftruths, quartertruths, eighthtruths and blatant lies about health care promulgated by the opponents of health care reform from the right, far right, extreme right, insurance companies, for-profit medical corporations outtolunch conservatives, teaparties and outright idiots are given equal footing and numbers with the objective and honest proponents of health care reform. Quantity is never the same as quality or objectivity or truth.

Just because the right says it, doesn't make it truthful or honest. Articles from all their mouthpiece publishers are not worth the paper or bits they are printed on.

The Critical Thinking and Analysis questions in this list seem loaded to reward ignorance and oversimplification of the issue.

Does this critical thinking section give any information about the political and social agendas of the groups represented by the authors of the articles? Probably not. Critical analysis requires that the reader know where on the political spectrum the authors are coming from, why they are saying what they say, and what corporations are funding them.

2. SIRS ISSUES RESEARCHER: CURRICULUM PATHFINDERS

Lots here!

"My Courses" and "Research Ideas" lists for each of the following Course Subjects: Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, Fine Arts, and Health.

For fun I picked the "Research Idea" CHILDREN'S LITERATURE under LANGUAGE ARTS. Got list of 286 results including 44 websites. The first articles that were listed on the page at right went from "E-Seuss" to "Censorship" to "Roald Dahl" to "Beverly Cleary" to "Dark Side of the Very Hungry Caterpillar" and more. Would love just to have the time to browse. I did speed reach the "Dark Side" article. Personally, I think the article author (not Eric Carle) was stretching the truth a bit here for his own self-gratification. Carle is NOT the only well-known twentieth century author to have survived the horrors of war. Nevertheless, it is interesting to know just how much adversity some of our lit heroes have overcome.

Links on the page include Quick Search, Advanced Search, Topic Browse, Database Features, My List, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Educator's Resources, Standards Correlations, Help, See Also subjects, Sort results by Date, Relevance, Lexile (high-low, low-high).

Source types include newspapers, magazines, gov't docs, viewpoints, reference, graphics/media, and webselect sites.

Seems like this could be very useful to students and teachers. Seems like this would simplify research over getting a kajillion hits on a google search. More importantly, these should be quality resources, too.

This will be a fun resource to share with teachers and students.