Lesson 1- World Book School Edition

I spent the past hour exploring the four World Book Online resources that are part of the School Edition: World Book Kids, World Book Students, World Book Advanced, and World Book Discoverer
I like how the articles in World Book Kids explain concepts at an appropriate level for young children. For example, when I did research on the wolf, the mammal of my choice for this assignment, the article explained that the wolf's actions in the children's story "Little Red Riding Hood" give the wrong idea about wolves, since they actually stay away from people as much as possible. I noticed the article on wolves that I accessed in World Book Students was written for students a little older than the students whom World Book Kids' articles are written for.
When I explored World Book Advanced, the features I found that will be useful for the middle school and high school students I teach include hearing the text read aloud, saving the article to a research folder, and emailing the article. For example, I introduce my middle school students to research paper writing by having them work in small groups. One student can easily email to another student in his/her group an article so that the both students can read the article and then decide whether to use the article for their group's research. I also liked the right side, where a student can find a list of links to primary sources related to his/her research topic.
As I navigated through an article on American government in World Book Discoverer, I thought that the feature where a person can double click a word to find its definition would be a great resource for a person who is not a good reader of English. Many readers like this would probably be reluctant to take the time to stop and look up words whose meanings they do not know, but this feature makes it so quick and easy to get definitions.
I'm glad that I now know about the various levels of the World Book Online Student Edition. I didn't know about all of the levels and their features, and I will definitely make time during the first few weeks of the school year to show my students these resources and the features that I think they will find especially helpful.