Gale Virtual Reference Library

I was a bit overwhelmed at first when viewing all the titles in the Gale Virtual Reference Library.  It really helped to think of specific topics in the middle school curriculum.  I did find the UXL Encyclopedia of World Mythology, 2009.  There is a teacher at my school that does an 8^th grade mythology class.  I do like that though the reference is on world mythology, I can look at the table of contents by culture.  I selected Greek and Roman mythology and then Aphrodite.  I liked that there were also great tools available such as printing, email, download, citation tools, listen, download MP3, and download PDF to eReader.  The information on Aphrodite was excellent and at the end of the section were links to other articles with that index term.  I really liked the “Read, Write, Think, Discuss” sections which give the article additional depth.

I searched propaganda once again as the 7^th grade English teachers are still working on this writing activity.  I sent the link to the results page to those teachers to allow them to select what article they thought would be most useful.  I chose an article titled Propaganda from the Dictionary of American History.  It was nice to be able to search other articles through the hyper-links related to the term.  I listened to the article and found under the settings I could change the speed at which the article was read.  Medium was the default setting and was the easiest for me to listen to the article, despite the voice being a bit mechanical.  There were other options for listening such as word and sentence, sentence only, word only and no highlighting.  I tend to like the highlighting which could aid students in following along. 

I did some other exploring which allowed me to identify subject areas useful to the curriculum areas in middle school.  I agree that taking the time to become familiar with this resource is the same as getting to know my own physical library collection.