Thing 1

Since my topic is to research a city in another country and the Greek Gods are still fairly popular, I decided to focus my topic on Athens, Greece. Aquabrowser didn't open for me (I have been having internet issues lately) but a Merriweather search throughout the entire district's resources vetted a nice assortment of books (both fiction and nonfiction), videos and websites about Athens, Greece.

The three search engines I decided to look at were CyberSleuth Kids, Awesome Library and Bing. I have noticed that a lot of students have begun using Bing and Ask.com. I think the Bing users have been influenced by the funny commercials and the Ask users like the search format of a question (although they often seem bummed when the site doesn't give them a brief answer and they still have to read!).

CyberSleuth Kids gave me 0 hits for Athens, Greece yet 14 for just Athens (some were about the Civil War - Athens, Georgia). One site (lonelyplanet.com) looked particularly good for students because it had fast facts on a sidebar, good white space and nice pictures but the vocabulary was difficult right off the bat using works such as myriad and hallow - yikes! Awesome Library was less than awesome. The websites it directed me to were mostly on the Olympics and Ancient Greece. Not really what I was hoping to find. Bing gave me a ton of sited divided nicely into categories with tabs at the top. Using the folder tabs the students could quickly find information such as web, maps, images and wikipedia. I will probably use Bing more next year with students.

The databases of the Smithsonian and of course Encyclopedia Britanica gave a lot of basic information that would be good for elementary students learning about a city in another country.

The most surprising result from this first activity was in using social networking sites to get information. Youtube had a number of videos similar to what I have thought about creating. None are exactly what I would like to create but a few would be worth showing as examples of what to do and what NOT to do. I also had not thought about blogs as a resource for a student activity (I don't know why b/c I use a number of blogs regularly for gaining information that I use as a librarian!). My search of blogs resulted in finding an interesting blog, The Real Housewives of Athens, Greece. Who knew!?