Tech 101 Special Edition: Research
Fast and Easy Tips to Make You Look Like A Tech Genius!
Special Edition: January 2017
Boise School District librarians offer this monthly newsletter to provide tips and information about some of the digital resources available to both teachers and students.
All of these programs and tools are available at the Boise Schools Library Portal Page or on individual school library websites.
All of these programs and tools are available at the Boise Schools Library Portal Page or on individual school library websites.
Be a Research Superstar!
Boise Schools and the Idaho Commission for Libraries have a number of useful online databases to support student research projects! Benefits of starting your research on your BSD Libraries Research Page include:
- Peer-reviewed articles
- advanced search, including reading level, date, and type of source
- translation into multiple languages
- hear articles read aloud with voice-to-text
- embedded glossaries of important terms
- multiple media types in one place
- ready-to-use citations
- research skills tutorials and activities
Gale Databases and Google
The Boise School District and Library Services provides several amazing databases. There are nine databases provided by Gale that can provide amazing resources for any course.
Here are just a few of the amazing functions they provide for teachers and students:
Here are just a few of the amazing functions they provide for teachers and students:
Sign into Google on any Gale Database
You can access any of our Gale databases and log into your Google account through the database. This allows students and educators to easily save articles and notes to their Google Drive.
Here are just some of the features you can access and save:
Here are just some of the features you can access and save:
- Citation Tools - Easily save your citations for your articles to EasyBib or Google Drive.
- Highlights and Notes - Use the highlight feature with six different colors and notes to organize your research in the article itself and then export them to your Google Drive.
- Download - You can simply download the entire article directly to your Google Drive.
- Translate - You can translate your article into 12 different languages.
- Listen - You can also listen to an audio track of the article and even download the audio file.
For teachers, you can also access your Google Classroom directly from any article and either assign it to a specific class or post the link as an announcement.
Save the article or your notes and highlights directly to your Google Drive.
Post articles directly to your Google Classroom.
Save your citation, available in four different formats, to your Google Drive or preferred citation tool.
Check out the Gale Power Search
New this year, is the Gale Power Search. This great search option searches all of the Gale Databases. You can then easily find articles from the different databases and save them directly to your Google Drive for later.
Power Search provides all of the same functions as the other databases, citation tools, highlights and notes, download or listening to the article.
Have students that don't know what to research or need to focus their topic? Power Search also provides an amazing feature called Topic Finder. Students can input their topic and visually see the top 100 words from that search shown as a graphic based on how often those words are used in the article.
Power Search provides all of the same functions as the other databases, citation tools, highlights and notes, download or listening to the article.
Have students that don't know what to research or need to focus their topic? Power Search also provides an amazing feature called Topic Finder. Students can input their topic and visually see the top 100 words from that search shown as a graphic based on how often those words are used in the article.
Research Center
An additional resource that's great for struggling students is the World Book Student Research Center. This site provides step by step help on how to plan out your research, evaluating your sources, how to organize the data you've collected and how to present and review your work.
Research Center also provides help for educators in the Educator Research Center. Resources about Information Literacy, help with plagiarism and even how you can collaborate with your librarian.
Research Center also provides help for educators in the Educator Research Center. Resources about Information Literacy, help with plagiarism and even how you can collaborate with your librarian.
As always, if you have any questions or need help with these databases, please contact your librarian.
For a complete list of all databases available to Boise School District students, along with passwords for off-campus access, please click here.