African Country Reports

AFRICAN COUNTRY REPORTS

1. Most reputable web sites end with .edu or .gov or .org.

San Francisco Unified School District: http://www.sfusd.edu

In the “Student Interest” section students can access the San Francisco Public Library in the section entitled “Museums and Libraries”

The Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov

This is the website for the catalog and digitzed Library collections in a project entitled “American Memory”.

· History for “kids” is found in “America’s Libraries”
· Legislative information is found in “Thomas”
· AND much more……
· Librarians’ Index to the Internet: http://lii.org
· This site contains websites that are constantly evaluated, updated and reviewed by groups of Librarians. Within subject headings,the categories of websites can include Best of…., Directories, Databases, Specific Resources

2. INVISIBLE WEB (Library Databases)
· Newsbank
· Available to ALL students, parents, and staff in SFUSD
· At school access the site from the bookmark file or from the school district web page (http://storm.sfusd.edu)
· On the blue navigation bar underneath the district graphic, click on “Educators and Students”
· This will drop down a menu. Choose “Teacher Interest”.
· In Teacher Interest, NEWBANK is the 6th item. Click on this.
· Newspaper and magazine articles and documents from over 2,000 sources cover all subject areas. This Collection is updated daily, provides multiple viewpoints, gives local/regional/national and international perspectives, provides first-hand reports, and tracks trends over time. Sources include U.S. and international newspapers, wire services, speeches, radio and TV broadcast transcripts, science journals, historical documents, UN and U.S. Government documents.
· BACKGROUND NOTES, a current resource from the U.S. government on countries, are provided in the database.
· At home, access Newsbank from the SFUSD website(http://storm.sfusd.edu). The user name and password are both the same: ra-sfusd

· San Francisco Public Library (http://sfpl.lib.ca.us/)
· Many databases are available from the public library. From the main page click on “E-books, magazines, newspapers, and other electronic resources”. Next, click on “Reference databases”. To access this resource, you must have a public library card because you have to type in your library card barcode number.
· The databases that will be the most useful for the country project are:
1. Magazines—EBSCO and INFOTRAC
2. Newspapers—Proquest
3. Electric Library
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica (on trial)

3. Library Spot is a free virtual library resource center for educators and students, librarians and their patrons, families, businesses and just about anyone exploring the Web for valuable research information. We created LibrarySpot.com to break through the information overload of the Web and bring the best library and reference sites together with insightful editorial in one user-friendly spot. Sites featured on LibrarySpot.com are hand-selected and reviewed by our editorial team for their exceptional quality, content and utility.
Published by StartSpot Mediaworks, Inc. in the Northwestern University/Evanston Research Park in Evanston, Ill., LibrarySpot.com is the first in a family of vertical information portals designed to make finding the best topical information on the Internet a quick, easy and enjoyable experience.

To date, LibrarySpot.com has received more than 30 awards and honors. Most recently, Forbes.com selected LibrarySpot.com as a "Forbes Favorite" site, the best in the reference category, and PC Magazine named it one of the Top 100 Web Sites. LibrarySpot.com has been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, CNBC and in many other media outlets.
· Go to http://www.libraryspot.com. On the yellow tool bar on the left side, scroll down to “REFERENCE DESK”, then to “Countries”. There are websites listed under three general categories: General Country Directories , World Regions, Reference

Medieval African Kingdoms....a time travel adventure (http://ctap295.ctaponline.org/~jboston/Student/s_index.html): This is a webquest to investigate Medieval African Kingdoms. This quest can be manipulated and modified to investigate other time periods and other ethnic groups/civilizations. "Your mission is to develop a winning promotional campaign for one of the three kingdoms of ancient western Africa. You will use the resources listed on the materials page to discover all you can about these kingdoms. You will need to learn about all three kingdoms because you will be judging the materials created by the other groups, not only for appearance, but also for accuracy and completeness.

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