Support At-Home Learning With New Student Online Resources

While school is a bit different this year, new online resources at San Mateo County Libraries can help make homework and lesson plans a little easier. Teachers, families, and students can now access content from ProQuest, TeachingBooks, and Britannica with their library card. These helpful resources are available to every student in California through the California K-12 Online Content Project, a joint partnership provided by the California State Library and the Riverside County Office of Education.

Britannica School/Escolar

This online database is the go-to site for K-12 research. Fifty-three thousand schools throughout the country use Britannica School to build essential information literacy skills, differentiate instruction, and support STEM education.

Britannica Escolar offers accurate and age-appropriate content in Spanish — made for native Spanish speakers, bilingual students, and students learning Spanish.

ProQuest for K-12

ProQuest is used by researchers and librarians around the world. San Mateo County students and educators have access to the following ProQuest databases:

• ​Culturegrams (Grades K-12): an online resource of reports on 209 countries, each U.S. state, and all 13 Canadian provinces and territories.
• SIRS Discoverer (Grades 3-9): a general reference database providing safe, reliable, curriculum-aligned content, and features for use by students and educators in Primary and early Secondary schools.
• SIRS Issues Researcher (Grades 6-12): delivers the pros and cons of social issues with relevant, credible information.
• eLibrary (Grades 6-12): a reference collection designed to support middle and high school students, college-prep and college-level researchers, and professional educators.
• Central Student (Grades 9-12): designed to bring results to students across thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, videos, reports, and other types of content.
• Research Companion (Grades 8-12): supports information literacy, writing, and research skills instruction occurring in libraries, classrooms, and online learning environments.

TeachingBooks

If TeachingBooks sounds familiar, that is because San Mateo County Libraries has offered it for a few years! TeachingBooks recently launched a public library interface called Book Connections — where you can find book readings, read-alongs, meet-the-author videos, book trailers, and more for children of all ages.

Even More Help for Learning at Home

San Mateo County Libraries also has other online resources that can help students excel in class:

• Brainfuse HelpNow: connects students with a live tutor for homework help in English and Spanish.
• ABCmouse: has 9,000+ interactive books, educational games, puzzles, and other learning activities.
• Novelist K-8 Plus: helps students, parents, and teachers identify reading level-appropriate books.
• Newsbank: allows students to search current and archived issues of local newspapers for full-text news articles, editorials, events, and more.

What library online resources are you using while learning at home? Let us know in the comments below.