SOFTWARE REVIEWS |
| THE 2000 CANADIAN ENCYLCOPEDIA STUDENT EDITION By DIANE MCCARGAR Using encyclopedias with literacy students is often difficult because of the language used in the articles, so when I first noticed that The 2000 Canadian Encyclopedia had a Student Edition I had great hopes. They hadn't used the word children in the title, yet the software claimed to be for students up to grade 9 and to contain 5000 articles written in "easy-to-understand" English. I guess easy-to-understand is all relative. Although the encyclopedia doesn't contain articles written at a beginner or intermediate level, it does contain tons of information about Canada. The encyclopedia is divided into two areas: places to find information and things to explore. In the Find section students have access to The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Gage Canadian Dictionary and The Gage Thesaurus. The page is divided into two areas. On the left you see the information about your search. On the right you see the article you have chosen to look at. Because the search results remain visible at the left, it is easy to jump between several articles to determine which one contains the information you are looking for. As with most software, they do tend to fall into the trap of providing too many different ways to search for information. A search by Title seemed to provide the simplest results. While reading an article you'll often have the chance to look at pictures or other media. Articles also occasionally contain links to Web sites that contain related information. If you have beginner readers, you may want to restrict your search to the Gallery of media. Here you can search for animations, graphs, maps, photos, sounds and videos, the majority of which are Canadian in content. For example, you can listen to the national anthem. You can also look at street maps for several major Canadian cities. Although the Canadian content is great, broad general content is slim. The Explore area of the program, contains a collection of interactive multimedia. The Retrospectives chronicle Canadian events over the past 100 years. Here you can also get access to a collection of graphs and quizzes. The graphs contain interesting information about cities across Canada but the quizzes seem to be short on practical content. If you're looking for an easy-to-read, general content encyclopedia, then this may not be the software for you. But if you'd like to have a Canadian reference source for your students, you should consider The 2000 Canadian Encyclopedia Student Edition.
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