An important part of the K-12 school experience is learning how to research a diverse range of topics. While the internet can be a good resource for older students, elementary-aged learners do better with a curated approach to research. A digital library full of age-appropriate resources including images, videos, charts and graphs, will serve these young learners well as they hone their research skills and discover new areas of interest.
Gale, a Cengage company, has a new addition to its Gale In Context family of products. Kids InfoBits has been relaunched as Gale In Context: Elementary, with new features that aim to help young learners to build their learning and critical thinking skills. Now redesigned and built exclusively for elementary school learners, Gale In Context: Elementary helps teachers to gradually guide students to become successful at learning as they transition to higher grade levels.
“As schools and students adapt to distant learning, it is critical for educators to provide equitable access across the K-12 continuum, said Paul Gazzolo, senior vice president and general manager at Gale. “Gale In Context: Elementary, offers students a trusted place to find answers and explore their interests, while also giving teachers access to digital resources that supplement and enhance instruction as well as promote student engagement.”
Gale In Context: Elementary provides young learners with a place to search for answers and explore their interests. With I Wonder questions, quick facts and visual topic pages, Gale In Context: Elementary represents a renewed focus on supporting elementary school students. The product is built using familiar Gale In Context design elements, making it easy for students to grow with Gale and develop their research skills as they progress to databases like Gale In Context: Middle School and Gale In Context: High School.
New features and enhancements of Gale In Context: Elementary include:
- Kid-Friendly Interface: a redesigned user experience created specifically for young students that encourages exploration through a visual topic tree.
- Topic Pages: previously known as portals, topic pages provide students with short, age-appropriate summaries for topics and organize resources for easy use in research projects.
- Leveled Content: leveled topic overviews provide users with both a basic and advanced version of the same overview, allowing educators to differentiate instruction.
- I Wonder…: questions that engage young users’ curiosity and draw them into topics. Continuously updated, the I Wonder question on the homepage encourages daily exploration
- Rich Content: search through thousands of indexed images, videos, charts and graphs
- New Proprietary Platform that allows users to:
-Search by Lexile range or find content based on basic, intermediate, or advanced learning levels to support differentiated learning styles.
-Use ReadSpeaker text-to-speech technology and on-demand article translation into over 20 languages—on-screen and read-aloud.
-Use citation tools to easily create a bibliography for their research.
-Use the Highlights and Notes feature to annotate and track their questions and ideas.
Gale In Context databases have a long history of supporting academic achievement and future-ready skill development. In a recent nationwide study conducted by Project Tomorrow® on behalf of Gale[i], 91 percent of teachers said their students’ research skills improved from using the Gale In Context databases to support their assignments and projects. Additionally, after using Gale In Context: Elementary, 70 percent of the students said they were now comfortable doing a research project on their own, and 79 percent agreed that they were comfortable using online databases to support their research assignments.
For more information or to request a trial on Gale In Context: Elementary, visit: www.gale.com/c/in-context-elementary.
