Sandy Garrett’s Column
With the school year in full swing, boys and girls are busy learning new things and completing classroom assignments. Backpacks are chock full of pens and pencils, books and paper, and most likely homework.
A great resource for homework help, project research or general knowledge is called the Digital Prairie. A set of statewide databases, the Digital
Prairie has a collection of full-text reference materials available for all Oklahomans to use for free, 24/7. All that is needed to get started is a computer connected to the Internet, a username and password, which you can get from your local school or public library.
Digital Prairie is a service of the Oklahoma Library Technology Network and is funded by the state Legislature through the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. Federal funds are also provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Great resources for school reports are available for any grade level and include articles from a wide variety of professional and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers. There are also historical and current maps of states and other countries, and pictures that can be downloaded.
Digital Prairie includes:
• EBSCO has thousands of complete articles, from both professional
journals and general interest magazines, as well as an encyclopedia, dictionary and an image collection. It has more than 1,000 national and international publications. There are search tools in place for students of all ages, parents and educators as well. “Searchasaurus” is designed for lower elementary, “Kids Search” is for upper elementary and middle school students, and “Student Research Center” is for middle and high school students.
• SIRS Discoverer is geared toward Grades K-8, with articles and Web
sites that are age-appropriate and selected by a team of former teachers.
It includes articles and images from more than 1,600 newspapers, magazines, government documents and appropriate Web sites.
• FirstSearch/WorldCat is a comprehensive bibliography, representing many
languages, and including information that is available in libraries around the world.
Access to Digital Prairie is available on the State Department of Education’s Web site http://www.sde.state.ok.us/ from the Library Media/Instructional Television office. Call your local school library or public library to get your username and password, so you can start exploring Oklahoma’s Digital Prairie – today!
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
nice article in the last years, we have seen the new technology like digital textbooks online ,digital syllabus and k12 online curriculum ….now children spend a lot of time on the web,and i think classroom must be more funny and more technological for children now…yes i’m agree children are busy now learning more thing,it’s true..
Doing some browsing and noticed your website appears a bit messed up in my K-meleon internet browser. But fortunately hardly anyone uses it any longer but you may want to look into it. – Thank you for your e-mail. This Internet of yours is a wonderful invention. — (email to Al Gore, mocking his famous Internet invention claim, quoted in Newsweek, Mar 2000) Attributed to George W. Bush
Loved this column! There is so much information that is available in the online research databases, and most people have no idea! Need information from a Wall Street Journal article from 2 years ago? Got it! Needing to do research in Consumer Reports on buying a new TV? Got it! What about general healthcare and prescription research? Got it!
The online databases have so much to offer everyone. And they are free–just go to your public library.