SIRS Discoverer

1. I did a search in Discoverer for armadillos. I found 70 articles and 37 of them were magazine articles. I like if you are looking for a magazine article and not a newspaper you can click on the tab and only get the magazines. Most of the read levels were easy or moderate. It is hard on my computer to see the difference in colors so I had to go into the article and see what the reading levels were for sure. I only found one of the 70 that was in the challenging level. Most of the articles had pictures which is nice for this age. I liked that before you went into the article that the icon was there to let you know that there was a picture. Sometimes students are looking for a picture rather then content. A lot of the web image sites are blocked at our school so this would be a source to find pictures of various items. It also told you if the article was about a person using the P, such as the article "A Learning Link to the Los Angeles Zoo " which was about the animal keeper Jami Shoemaker. Sometimes when a student is looking for facts articles like this one would probably not be there first choice even though they have good information. It is nice that you can sort my date, relevance, and reading level. When needing a current article you can sort by date and get the newest one on top. Sometimes the teacher will only let students use articles that are less than 5 years old so this would be a good tool in that case. Good and colorful source.

2. I picked Germany as my country. The first thing that was available was printable worksheets in various levels to organize the facts. This articles also provided a map and a picture of the flag. It then gave the facts in a very organized way with headings being population, geography & weather, economy, government, and history. It gave a very nice timeline of Germany's history. At the end Discoverer also gave you contacts for more information such as the the German Embassy in the United States. It also told you all the sources that they used to get the information in the article. There was also links to related articles at the very bottom if the information was not enough.

I selected Brazil for the maps of the world. The search produced 12 different maps. Some were historical and had certain years of how the country looked at the time. One of them showed where the sugar cane was grown in Brazil. It was hard to find a detailed map of just Brazil but there was one. The maps also had some related articles for each picture which was very nice. It also was nice that these maps can be printed for use in school projects.

I decided to do biographies. I put in Edgar Allen Poe. Discoverer found 7 articles. Two newspapers, 4 magazines, and 3 pictures. I'm not quite sure how that adds up to 7. I am assuming that some pictures are in the articles that are already mentioned. In the pictures it also gave you articles that the pictures went along with. It also gave you reading levels. Most of the them were easy and moderate with one challenging. Discoverer also gave you subjects to further explore if you wanted to dig deeper. At the end of some articles, they also gave you further reading if you needed more information.