World Book and EdOptions Academy: A Perfect Match

About a month ago I received a phone call that I had been waiting to hear for five years. I was told that World Book was available as a media center for EdOptions Academy. This was exciting news. I first viewed World Book Online Encyclopedia back in 2008 at the Florida Education Technology Conference. I was hooked. It would provide the Academy with an element that was missing and bring our Academy to another level.

The Academy now has an internal research tool that both students and teachers can leverage. The student research tool can even teach the students how to do a research paper and how to cite it. The Academy is more than excited to have this tool available and the best news yet - this service is free to any student enrolled in the Academy!

Here are some highlights:

World Book Online offers the Academy grade appropriate material covering grades 6 - 9 using World Book Student and grades 8 – 12 using World Book Advanced.

World Book Student offers the following:
• More than 40,000 encyclopedia and reference articles
• World Book Biography Center, with more than 10,000 biographies
• Rich multimedia – audios, videos, and animations
• Historical features
• Extensive dictionary and atlas
• Educator tools
• Student activities and research tools
     • The research tools teach students how to do research, citations, and build timelines.
     • My Research feature allows students to save research materials with a secure login
 
World Book Advanced offers the following:
• A vast collection of primary source documents and full-text, downloadable e-books
• More than 25,000 encyclopedia articles
• More than 10,000 sounds and pronunciations
• Thousands of images
• Thousands of editor-selected Web sites
• Thousands of periodical articles
• Atlas and Dictionary databases
• Individual accounts within the site offer users the ability to create and save their own content features
 
As you can tell, we are excited about World Book and all it can provide EdOptions Academy students. Couple this with our award-winning Plato Courseware and your students will have an educational experience that they will be excited about themselves.

Stay tuned for future blog posts where I will follow up on the actual student and teacher usage of this tool and track student success. As we all know, buy in is key to success but data is the proof of success. We have the buy in so the next step in this journey that started five years ago is the proof.