| What's
on This Page
|
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| Find Periodical Articles |
Academic Search Premier provides indexing for just over 8,000 periodicals, and full text articles for over half of those titles.

6. Type in your
search terms and hit
.
Note: the asterisk in classroom* means that the search will be for the word classroom or its plural.
Use Academic Search Premier to identify at least one periodical article on your topic. From the results list, click on the article title to get to the screen with more information.
Article title__________________________________________________
Periodical title (look where the screen says Source)
_____________________________________________________
Date of periodical_______________
For fun, go back
to the main Academic Search Premier interface, and
try a Visual Search. Wow!!
The database offers a nifty email feature. Once your article is
on your screen, click on E-mail towards the top of
the screen.
| Find ERIC Documents |
ERIC is a complex database, so we recommend you click on Advanced Search to use the Advanced Search mode. Here's a sample search:

Here we are asking
the database to search for the phrase "high school"
or its plural AND the term multicultural. The
quotation marks keep words in phrases together. We limited the search to materials available free in full text, published between 2001 and 2008.
Click to go to ERIC. Devise
a search of your own to look for educational resources on your topic.
Make notes here about what you find:
Title____________________________________________
Year published___________________
ED or EJ#____________________________
.
Title____________________________________________
Year published___________________
ED or EJ#____________________________
The ERIC Thesaurus provides an excellent listing of specialized terms and concepts used in the database. Click on the ERIC Thesaurus tab, and do any of the the following:
- Browse by categories listed at bottom of screen
- Enter a concept in the search box, to find suggested thesaurus terms
- Click on any thesaurus term, to view broader, narrower, and related terms
- Use the thesaurus terms as part of your search (use quotation marks around the phrases)
| Find Books in the Library |
Books are mostly found in the main stacks. You'll also occasionally run across books shelved in Reference (you use those in the library).
Increasingly, you'll also find eBooks, electronic versions of printed books. You can read the library's eBooks from any computer connected to the Internet. When you are on campus using the online catalog, you just click through to read them. If you're off campus, the easiest way to access eBooks is the following:
Look up a book (or books) on your topic and take notes about what you find:
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
| Find Videos etc. |
Multimedia files of various sorts -- videos and audio files -- are the fastest growing part of the Web. You probably know about YouTube and GoogleVideos. But, better quality videos are available at
Seeing outselves: Google Earth is software -- it's on all the computers in the classroom. But, now, Microsoft is answering back with Live Search Maps. Click on Aerial and type in an address. This is photography!
| Looking for Web Sites on Your Own |
The Internet is an open publishing environment -- anyone can publish a Web page. It is important to ask yourself questions like:
It's one thing for you to have a reference to a URL from your textbook or instructor. It's quite another thing for you to venture out to find a good Web site on your own. Evaluation is important!
3. Frequently (but not always), a tilde (the symbol ~) prior to a file name indicates that it is someone's personal Web page. Some places on the Web are in the business of hosting personal Web pages. When a domain name has geocities, angelfire, tripod, or aol in it, the Web page is probably a personal one.
4. If a site has a long file name, try taking off the last part of the URL to see the Web page or site to which it is hooked.
Smart Searching. Use quotation marks to hold words in phrases together, as illustrated here:

Google searches several of its databases simultaneously for you. The databases you may want to search on your own at Google are the Books database, and Scholar, which is Google's database of periodical articles. Not everything is available full text (in fact, very little in Scholar is), but what a treasure! You can just switch over to the other databases using the drop down menu:

Here I am doing a search in Googles Books database for "two way immersion." I limited my search to the books I can read cover to cover (full view):

Search for Web sites on your topic. Since you are using words for searching, and will become knowledgeable about which words retrieve appropriate resources, you can use the boxes below to record your keywords and their relationships as you do your searching:
| Concept 1 | Concept 2 | Concept 3 |
Make notes below about 2 quality Web sites you find.
1. URL_________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
2. URL_________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
.
| Please
tell us what you
thought of this Web exercise. Thanks. |
T. N. Smalley, last rev. 2/08