Geographical Resources

Marilyn Rivers-Bowerman attracted my attention with her discussion on geographical resources.  

She concluded, "I think that the "best" geographical resource is dependent upon the purpose and the type of research assigned. If I want quick and easy locations, I would use a print atlas, recently published, and that has a clear, alphabetized index. However, if I am looking for more detailed and specialty information, certain online sites would be an excellent place to start. The bottom line is to evaluate these reference sources for authority, scale, currency, index, and format."

Marilyn has hit the nail on the head as far as I am concerned.  It is important for teachers to know, as well as teach their students, exactly what the purposes of their research are.  Once their purposes are clearly defined, it is much easier to know where to start looking; print resources such as atlases, or electronic resources such as the CIA World Factbook database.  If a student is researching the geography of a country, they should look for resources that reflect this focus such as maps and population statistics.  If they are researching the culture of a country, their focus would not be to find maps and population statistics.  

Databases

Its your friendly, neighbourhood teacher librarian here with some thoughts on databases and google!

When working with my partners for Assignment 3, Tosha and Jennifer Kennedy, Tosha inspired me with a resource titled, "Its google.com, not google.edu!"  Although this is something that, as teachers we all recognize, it is important to remember that our students will probably not make this distinction automatically.  When I ask my grade 6 and 7 students if they know that some of the information that they find on the internet is not true, they all answer yes, but they do not seem concerned with presenting false information in their projects.  The students of mine that come to the library to do research are quite used to me directing them to the Encyclopedia of BC online, or World Book online, (these sites are provided free by the Surrey School District), but the information they are looking for is often not in these databases.  In a perfect world, we would have access to fabulous databases on Freddy Adu (soccer star), Chris Brown (R and B singer and dancer - and boyfriend of Rhiana), and Trevor Linden (probably needs no expl.).  Unfortunately, when doing biographical research on people who are somewhat recently popular, students have no choice but to use a larger search engine such as google.  I have made an effort to stock my library with books on these recent popular icons (there is an awesome NFic series called "Hip Hop" by Mason Crest publishing that has titles such as Mariah Carey, LL Cool J, Chris Brown etc) but it is impossible to cover everyone.  In short, databases are best for the topics that they cover but we need access to more inclusive databases with current and popular topics and information to better serve our students.  Regarding the more current, popular topics I will continue to teach my students how to ethically and efficiently research on Google.