Webivore

This exciting new Internet site will help your children with school reports and general information acquisition. Today we tried to find out more information on tides by looking on the Internet. My son was so overwhelmed with the number of links, it became rather frustrating. This service will help make the process something much less intimidating.

Right now this is a school-based service. In the beginning of 1999, however, the service will be opened to home users. Keep checking in the site for more information this month. The service is free right now, but will soon have a small access fee. Webivore is set up to serve students in the middle school (grades 5-8) high school (9-12) and college levels. You will access the area that fits your child's age level when you are ready to do real research. You will have access to any of the areas, so don't worry if you have more than one child.

From the main research screen you will find three pull down menus to the right. The first one allows you to select a general knowledge category (music, art, history etc.) If you choose music, for example, you then move to the next tool bar and narrow your search. Here you might select classical music. The third menu lets you select from many categories, but let's say you choose Bach. You will now see a list of links displayed. You won't see 10 million, but the ones you do see have been well researched, and are appropriate for children.

By clicking on one of the links, you will see a preview screen to the left. Unlike other search engines that take you directly to the site, you will first see what is one the site, what the staff thought about it, and what type of multimedia you might find. You can then jump to the site if it looks like it will suit your needs.

From here, the research process becomes fun! If you switch to "collect" mode, you can now grab anything you see and save it for future use. Simply highlight text or graphics and drag them into a box on the right side of your screen. Everything is saved

in a nice, neat folder, with any notes you may need to make to yourself.

You can open this 'notebook' in any word processor when you are ready to write. The neat thing is that all citations an URL's are saved automatically for you. Your notebook looks like a long string of 3x5 cards. At the top of the screen you will see internal hyperlinks which take you to any of the references you have created. This makes the process of gathering and compiling information much less painful for most students.

Families will be able to use this service for research, report writing, or just interesting browsing. The format makes this much more appealing than sifting through thousands of sites in a general search engine, most of which have nothing to do with what

you were interested in. This site even made ME feel less intimidated about the Internet research process. Granted, you won't find every subject under the sun. They have chosen, for the time being, to stick to general 'school' categories. There is, however, plenty here to spark and interest, or to use for research practice and assignments.

***NOTE: In April of 1999 The Learning Company added Webivore to it's Essential Online Collection. This puts Webivore on the list of top online K-12 products which The Learning Company is promoting.

You can check this new site out at http://www.webivore.com