Welcome to the
February
issue of our K-12 newsletter. This newsletter is designed to help
teachers, librarians and administrators stay informed about the latest
changes to your subscription, while providing classroom resources and
giving tips for using your subscription in a variety of settings.
Don't miss our online archive (now available on proquestk12.com) for access to past issues, and to make changes to your newsletter options.
eLibrary® Canada & CE Updates
Our product development team is constantly reviewing customer feedback and making changes to our learning resources to meet your needs. Several updates or content additions were recently completed, and we wanted to bring them to your attention.
Here’s a brief rundown of the newest tweaks and system enhancements now online inside eLibrary, eLibrary Science, and our BookCart tool.
eLibrary Citation Generator
For years, online researchers at all grade levels have struggled with what should be an easy feat -– generating citations for their Works Cited pages and bibliographies.
Truth be told, most of us would rather have our computers create our bibliographies, rather than cracking open the MLA Handbook time and again. And for all but one online reference tool, you'll still need that hefty tome to be close at hand.
Launched early last week, our new, exclusive eLibrary citation generator tool (available in all versions) is here to take the pain away! Simply put, this new feature provides point-and-click Web forms for building citations that conform to the MLA style.
These forms can be edited to refine the formatting of the bibliographic information received from publishers, so that your citations can meet any need. There are 14 distinct citation formats available.
Just click the small citation button at the top of any eLibrary resource to view a detailed, editable MLA citation reference.
Our entire collection of training demonstrations are now sporting easy-to-use menus, as well as updated content!
To tap into our Flash demos and learn more about all of our ProQuest solutions anytime, anywhere, just access the Training & Support section of our K-12 website, and click on Recorded Training. You'll be learning and exploring your subscriptions in no time.
Looking for a fresh, up-to-date solution to power your social sciences, geography, or cultural studies curriculum? As always, our CultureGrams line is here to help.
And earlier this month, our editors were proud to launch a new product -- Provinces Edition -- with reports on all 13 of Canada's provinces and territories.
Provinces Edition is ideal for upper elementary and middle school students studying Canada. Each province's report contains fascinating information on categories such as Geography; Wildlife; Environmental Issues; History; Population; Cultural Notes; and First Nations, Métis, and Aboriginal Peoples.
Each report includes maps, charts, a history timeline, and useful images, such as photos of the province's official emblems. Plus, statistical tables allow students to compare basic information on all of the provinces.
Find out more about CultureGrams at our K-12 website, or sign up for a free trial today.
CultureGrams can help you broaden your students' understanding of the world and its peoples. The World Edition includes 190+ country profiles, written for junior high students and older. CultureGrams also has a Kids Edition, Provinces Edition, and a States Edition, geared for upper elementary students. These editions include kid-friendly profiles of 70+ countries, all 50 states (including Washington, D.C.), and the Canadian provinces.
CultureGrams goes beyond mere facts and figures to deliver an insider's perspective on daily life and culture, including the history, customs, and lifestyles of the world's people.
Province:
Saskatchewan
Capital City: Regina
Population: 985,400
Total Area: 651,036 square kilometres (251,366 sq miles)
Population Density: 1.50 persons per square kilometre (3.90 per sq mile)
Did You Know?
Saskatchewan gets its name from the Cree word kisiskatchewan, which means “the river that flows swiftly.”
The only training academy for Royal Canadian Mounted Police recruits is located in Regina.
The city of Estevan in southeastern Saskatchewan is known as the sunshine capital of the Canada. Estevanians enjoy an average of 2,500 hours of sunshine per year!
Saskatchewan has more kilometres of road (totaling 250,000 kilometres or 150,000 miles) than any other province.
Saskatchewan has around 250 golf courses, more courses per capita than anywhere else in the world.
The first bird sanctuary in North America was established in 1887 at Last Mountain Lake.
The waters of Little Manitou Lake are so salty that swimmers float without using any flotation device!
Curling was named Saskatchewan’s official sport in 2001.
Climate
Saskatchewan’s climate is continental, meaning it has short, warm summers and long, cold winters. Temperatures vary from year to year, but the average summer temperature is 18.5°C (65°F). Winters are much cooler, with an average temperature of around -18°C (0°F) in the Regina area and -28°C (-18°F) in the northern area. Blizzards are also common in the winter. Winds whip across the province all year long, and the occasional tornado hits the southern half of the province. The constant winds make for a very dry climate, and droughts frequently plague farmers in southern Saskatchewan.
Bands of Brothers
The first people to live in what is now Saskatchewan belonged to seven different bands, or tribes. Groups of bands joined together to form nations, trading with each other in times of peace and helping protect fellow bands in wars with other nations. In northern Saskatchewan, there were the Slavey, Beaver, and Chipewyan bands. The southern area of the province was home to the Cree, Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, and Assiniboine bands. The northern bands spoke Athapaskan languages and hunted caribou and moose throughout the northern forests. The southern bands spoke Siouan languages and used spears to hunt buffalo across the central and southern plains. Buffalo hunters drove herds of buffalo off cliffs or into pounds (corrals). All of these early peoples used every part of the animals they hunted to support themselves and their families. Buffalo and caribou hides (skins) were made into clothes, blankets, and coverings for tents. Bones and antlers were used to make weapons and tools. The bands added to their food supply by collecting berries, nuts, and roots, and they stored them for the wintertime when food was hard to find.
First Nations, Métis, and Aboriginal Peoples
Around 15 percent of Saskatchewan’s population is aboriginal (native). A little over 10 percent are First Nations peoples, while close to 5 percent are Métis. There are 72 different First Nations bands (tribes) in Saskatchewan, and they are the fastest growing group in the province. The province’s 156 reserves cover approximately 850,500 hectares (2.1 million acres) of land in mostly rural areas. About half the aboriginal population lives on reserve and half lives in urban areas. Many aboriginals attend the First Nations University of Canada -- the only fully accredited, First Nations-owned and operated university in the nation. The university opened in 1976 with the goal of educating First Nations students in their native history, culture, language, and art. First Nations peoples, along with some non-First Nations peoples, from all over Canada come to attend this unique school. The university has around 1,200 students and has campuses in Regina, Saskatoon, and Prince Albert.
Prairie Fiction
Saskatachewan has a lively and long literary tradition. In 1941, Sinclair Ross published his novel As For Me and My House. The book focused on life in the Canadian prairies during the Great Depression and has since become a Canadian classic. Ross is considered a pioneer in what became an entire genre (category or style) of literature -- prairie fiction. In 1969, Saskatchewan poet Anne Szumigalski helped found the Saskatchewan Writers Guild to help encourage and promote Saskatchewan writers. Four years later, Szumigalski also helped start Grain, a provincial literary journal. For more than 30 years, it has continued to publish the best in new literarature and art from Canada and around the world.
To find out more about CultureGrams and our new Provinces Edition, connect to our website today.
Enhancing Teacher-Librarian Collaboration: All of our eLibrary subscriptions provide much more than access to a raw "database" of resources. It's also the only K-12 teaching and learning solution in Canada that makes it possible to author original lesson plans, activities, curriculum, and assessments with our one-of-a-kind BookCart tool.
But even more than that, have you been looking for an easy and effective way to promote information literacy, inquiry-based learning activities, and increase teacher use of library resources and librarian expertise?
Our BookCart tool (named for the traditional book cart of learning resources that was rolled into classrooms by librarians) lets you do that and more. This breakthrough tool helps teachers and librarians create lesson plans for digital information literacy that offer advantages well beyond those of EBSCO, Gale, and Google. Suddenly a library database becomes a "solution" for teachers, librarians, but most of all, students.
Learn more about this exclusive eLibrary tool that integrates digital resources and assessments into daily classroom use, and encourages teacher-librarian collaboration.
Engaging Issues Bookcart Guide Update: This newly revised guide helps teachers use our special collection of 90 customized eLibrary Bookcarts that support mini-research activities designed to motivate and engage student interest. The activities correlate to national standards and support the core curriculum in health, science, language arts, and social studies.
Model BookCarts: Librarian and teacher collaboration just got a lot easier thanks to the eLibrary model BookCart collection. Many eLibrary subscribers are not aware of the unique BookCart tool and for many who are, they may view it as a great idea, "but creating BookCarts is just one more task in my very full schedule."
The good news is that librarians and teachers don't have to create their own BookCarts unless they want to. Your eLibrary subscription entitles you to copy one or all of the 520 model BookCarts in the eLibrary collection -- and nobody else can provide these unique learning resource models for you and your teachers.
The "ProQuest Carts" tab collection of BookCart Editor is organized into folders so that teachers and librarians can easily find and review the BookCart models that support their curriculum area and curriculum level: high school, middle school, and upper elementary school. Folders are also organized by subject areas taught based on titles that correlate state standards: Science -- Environmental, Science -- Physical, Science -- Technology; SS -- US History, and SS -- Geography as examples.
Look for our newest folder containing over 35 BookCarts specifically geared toward Canadian curriculum.
Finding great models and review them for your teachers that you know that your teachers assign. Copy and edit the models that will instantly support the research topics.
Give them a list of these BookCarts and show them how to use them and you will have teachers and students more eager to use your library resources than ever before. This is very important to your library program because the growing use of Google not only impacts on the use of the library but also by-passes your expertise in information literacy. You should also give them this guide to help them compare eLibrary and BookCarts to Google researching.
Our trainer, Tasha Maddison, is standing by to help you get the most
out of your subscription--and learn more about our other digital learning
resources! She offers a wide variety of online training sessions (check our calendar of events) each
month.
The training sessions cover after-school hours within several time
zones. Best of all, there's no cost to participate. All you need is a
computer with Internet access, a phone and one hour. Click the button to sign up:
Video Podcast
Let’s face it--no matter how many times we visit our favorite online learning resources, we’re bound to miss a feature or two. This month, our free video podcast focuses on one of the least-known but most useful feature sets of your eLibrary subscription: Citation Generator Tool.
As we mentioned at the top of this month's newsletter, each new eLibrary resource citation is generated from within an opened article, photo, or other resource -– just click the citation icon that now appears in the document information bar.
This opens a page that contains both the citation generated for this newspaper article as well as a Web form with most fields auto-populated with the metadata received from the publisher.
Chapter and section identifiers for the citation type as it appears in the MLA Handbook (6th edition) appear in the gray Edit Citation bar, along with the MLA chapter and section identifiers for citing resources from subscription databases.
A prompt for more information appears in red when any field is blank. In this citation, the place of publication isn't needed for the newspaper article that appears in the podcast (the city name is in the title of the newspaper). The edition, however, might found by returning to the document to see whether additional data is available.
If the information is found, click on the citation icon again and edit the appropriate field. The correct formatting is shown in the examples to the right of each field. Once the citation form is edited, click the Update Citation button.
Copy and paste the citation text into your research notes or a Works Cited document. At this time the eLibrary citation generator has 14 distinct citation forms. You can view examples of these forms -- and print out this entire process for your personal, library, or classroom use –- via our new quick start guide. Connect to www.proquestk12.com/go/elibrarycitations and the guide will start downloading automatically.
We know you and your students will find our new, exclusive citation generator to save time and reduce research headaches – in the classroom, media center, or even at home.
Now you’re in the know! We hope this month’s tip and trick bring you closer to being a true eLibrary power user. Be sure to sign up for our free video podcast (no iPod necessary!) to stay up-to-date.
Each month, our SIRS® WebSelect and SIRS® Discoverer WebFind editorial teams scour the Internet for top-quality sites that help teachers teach and students learn. Although no Internet site can supplant a quality research database, these vetted resources offer unique resources that are sure to be of interest.
"Martin Luther King, Jr. was the most famous black orator in history. But he was hardly alone. For generations, African Americans have been demanding justice and equality, reminding America to make good on its founding principles of democracy. These orators, and the very act of speaking out, played a crucial role in the long struggle for equal rights. Hear some of those seminal speeches at Say It Plain." (AMERICAN PUBLIC MEDIA) Read or listen to speeches from notable African-Americans such as Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Barack Obama.
"Is the climate warming? Are we the cause? These questions are at the heart of today's public debate about global warming. Conflicting opinions are everywhere, but now is your chance to cut through the noise and discover the facts." (KOSHLAND SCIENCE MUSEUM) Learn about the greenhouse effect, carbon cycle, and aspects of climate change through articles and online activities.
Freevibe
Organization: Nat'l Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign
This anti-drug site for teens provides information on the dangers of drug abuse, including the dangers of specific illegal drugs. Site visitors can ask questions on drugs, relate their drug stories, learn why people take drugs, and focus on strategies for avoiding drug use. Information on cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse and depression is also featured.
ProQuest offers a growing family of K-12 classroom-focused,
subscription-based online research tools. Many of these education solutions offer reading level-linked
(lexile) content, support
21st-century information
literacy skills, and help schools differentiate instruction across all curriculum areas.
Learn more about all of our tools here, tap into our training resources and videos, and don't miss our new eLibrary research tool (more). We also have a pair of special resource pages just for teachers (with lesson plans) and librarians.
Province:
Let’s face it--no matter how many times we visit our favorite online learning resources, we’re bound to miss a feature or two. This month, our free video podcast focuses on one of the least-known but most useful feature sets of your eLibrary subscription: Citation Generator Tool.
