This step involves moving data from the Internet to your word processing files and diskette. Do not take the longer procedure of making a printout of a web page and then typing what you want back into a word processor. This wastes time and unnecessarily kills trees. Create overlapping windows and copy what you want directly from a web page to your word processor file. When you have seen the tutorial videoclip, set up your computer the same way using a web browser such as Netscape and a blank word processing page.

Select & Preview Quickly

The emphasis in curriculum building is to find resources that you can preview, that is, put your hands on, read, study and evaluate. Local resources are generally the most efficient for this goal though not necessarily the best.

Reading Center - CEAP

• Search Reading Center's Online Collection of Teacher Resources and Children's Literature. Over 6100 titles are available. If you enter nothing, it will find all records. As an example, search the "Subject Area" field for "animals".
• When you search Hunter Library's Online Catalog you can restrict (LIMIT) your search to materials housed in the Curriculum Center. Further, you can restrict the search to media types, such as videotape. The Curriculum Center includes resources for teachers and students such as books, videotapes and videodiscs.

Periodicals: Journals, Magazines, Newspapers

To effectively find periodicals, it helps to know the name of specific publications that write for children. In many cases, the articles in magazines written for children are not indexed by the online services. It is likely however that the children's publication maintains a web page from which you can gather more information.


• Ask ERIC, Web System
ERIC is the U.S. Educational Resource Information Center, in Web graphics format. At this Web site you will find: lesson plans; facility to Search the ERIC database of articles; and search help. These citations and abstracts are collected from 16 special educationally focused clearinghouses and the total collection represents some 500,000 articles and documents with over 25,000 added per year. This ERIC search system may not have as many features as the ERIC database service at your local campus library. The citations found here are written for teachers but reference ideas and activities for children.
• Yahooligan's for Kids.
  
  Use their search system and hunt for a term or concept such as "farm animals" or enter the term magazines or news in the search window to find online magazine or news resources more focused on the needs of children and young adults.

• Excite uses a concept search engine.  That is, if you search for kitten, the database knows relationships between many words and will also find web pages on cats.
• More Internet search systems are available.

Select and Order

Tools in this section help identify potentially newer or better resources than those available locally, but to actually determine their quality for unit and lesson planning, you would also have to find the title in local libraries, order them through InterLibrary Loan or purchase them through bookstores in order to preview and study them. InterLibrary Loan can take days or weeks so planning well ahead of schedule is necessary to take advantage of this resource.

This section is a tiny subset of the Resources for Children and Young Adult's web page which is a subset of the Physical Library - Global web page with additional resources more appropriate for finding adult resources. That is, all the links on this page are integrated with the other information retrieval resources provided on the Physical Library - Global web page.

Bookstores

Amazon Bookstore contains over 2.5 million titles. This bookstore will also let you indicate topics of interest and notify you by email as new titles arrive.
To search their site for children's books try one of these two general strategies:
1. Click the link on the left of their Search page titled Children's Book by Age
2. Enter these search phrases exactly into the Subject field of the standard search page.
• child books/baby-preschool
• child books/ages 4-8
• child books/ages 9-12

child books/young adult

K-12 Libraries

Searching elementary, middle or high school libraries is an excellent way to scan for age appropriate books for different maturity levels. That is, by default, each library is an is already presorted index of age appropriate materials for the age level of that school building and region. If you need materials specific to a geographic or cultural region of the country, search the online school libraries within that region. At this time, the percentage of K-12 libraries that are online is very small but this should change rapidly in the next couple of years.
• Dade County, Fl. Public Schools Patron Access Catalog but instead of searching All Libraries, use the pull-down menu to select Elementary Libraries.