by Keith Humphrey and Joanne Fortunato

J. Weston Walch, Publisher 

This text starts off with quick and direct tutorials on the major features of the multimedia encyclopedias on the market today. The focus of this text is not the tutorials, but the activities that follow. Multimedia Encyclopedias: Successful Strategies for Classroom Use focuses on Social Studies, English and Science activities as well as a few miscellaneous activities in the subjects of art, health, foreign language and educational software such as Sim City, Carmen Sandiego, and The Oregon Trail.

Throughout the student and teacher text you will see eye catching screen shots from the Microsoft Encarta 96 Encyclopedia® demonstrating the types of a information available with multimedia encyclopedias. References are included throughout the text for the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia® and the Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia®. While these three encyclopedias are covered in the text, the activities can be applied to any multimedia encyclopedia on the market.

This text contains activities that will show your students not only how to access information within a multimedia encyclopedia, but also gives clear directions for printing text and graphics and copying and pasting text and graphic information into a word processing or desktop publishing document. Your students will learn how to store links to data in the encyclopedia in a bookmark file that can be used for future references or even during a computer presentation to the class.

With the improvement of telecommunications you will also find encyclopedia have links to on-line services and the Internet. You can go on-line to commercial on-line services, such as America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy and even the Internet to find up-to-the-minute updates to articles in your encyclopedia. With a multimedia encyclopedia and a connection to the Internet the world has become a global library of information.

You, the teacher, are not left out of this textbook because the success of any lesson is equal to teacher input. Time is allowed for brief discussion and demonstrations before many of the hands-on activities. At the beginning of each chapter, you will find teacher notes containing an overview of the chapter and a breakdown of every activity. The teacher notes for each activity also include an overview of the lesson, student objectives, the approximate amount of time allotted for the given activity, materials needed, additional notes and suggestions and a list of tutorials from Chapter 1 needed to be completed in order to be able to do the activity. In addition, you will find many reproducible material.