The Internet Public Library is hosted by "The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, with major support from the College of Information at Florida State University. The web site was founded in 1995.
In my school district we are fortunate to have fairly current reading textbooks. However, most of our textbooks are outdated. The dictionaries, thesaurus and encyclopedias we have are 8-9 years old!
Yesterday, I was working with a group of students during guided reading. One of the tasks was for the students to get their thesaurus and find synonyms for 5 of their vocabulary words. One student brought the thesaurus to me and told me that none of the vocabulary words were in her thesaurus! I looked for myself and sure enough, the words were not there! Why, because the thesaurus was published in 2000!!!! She asked, "how am I going to finish my assignment?"
Honestly, I had not looked at the dates in the thesaurus because I inherited this classroom and up until this point, the lesson plans that we are requested to use has not required the use of a thesaurus. Plus, I have three that I have been allowing the students to use. It just so happened that we started RTI this week and the lesson called for one. Long story short, I went to my computer to see if I could access this site and when I was able to, I loaded it to all the student computers. They absolutely loved it.
Today, after we completed our science lesson, my students took turns looking up information related to our lesson. And, one thing that thrilled them was the fact that they can ask a librarian a question and get a personalized answer.
I like the site for myself as well. I found a couple of articles that will be of assistance to me in my research that I am conducting for my AR project. I e-mailed a question also that I would like answered.
Most of you probably know this site already and use it frequently, but if not, check it out. The screen shot is of the web page at http://www.ipl.org.
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