Technology

[Margaret Scites <mscites@ACCESS.K12.WV.US>]

        I have been reading the letters about World Book and Britannica
and couldn't resist adding my two bits.
        We have installed World Book Multimedia on a 9-gig hard drive and
have it on six workstations.  The text and graphics are fine, but we cannot
get sound or motion video.  I'm not technical enough to understand why not,
but for high school students researching the text and graphics are great.
Our printing is very slow, but we think that is probably a Windows problem.
Networking with Windows is also new for us this year so we are still working
out some bugs.  Last year we ran the DOS version of World Book using CBIS
software.
        Our other wonderful new find of the year is Britannica Online, and
I'm wondering if it has been discovered by anyone else who has just not men-
tioned it yet.  I just stumbled across it on Internet, found out we could get a
 week's free trial. After the trial I was able to purchase for this year -  It is 
expen-
sive $895 per year for up to 1000 students.  However, I love the natural language
searching feature and the online version has hypertext links to Internet.  It helps
teach students about using Internet resources without overwhelming them.   By
the way we put an icon on  Windows that allows students to go directly to EB.  We
use Netscape which allows students to print easily. Of course, here we are with the
problem how to supervise Internet access - another discussion I've been following
 with interest, but we will leave that for another time.
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Name: Margaret Scites
E-mail: mscites@p7.s501.c35.k12.wv.us (Margaret Scites)
Date12/04/95
Time: 11:38:23


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