How to... make the most of the Teaching K-8 online archive

Teaching Pre K-8, Mar 2002 by Lindroth, Linda

TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR CLASSROOM

Do you wish you could find that curricular unit you used last year for Music in Education Month - the one about making your own instruments? Are you thinking about repeating the Trucker Buddies project you did several years ago with your third graders, which involved your students using their communication skills to talk with truckers and track the truckers' progress by mapping the travels? Does your fifth grade class seem ready for that Shakespeare activity you read about four years ago?

Finding these activities used to require a search through the stack of Teaching K-8 magazines in your classroom or school library to locate the feature. Now, the search is easy! Using our new online archive, you can do a title or keyword search from the Teaching K-8 website to locate all three of the lessons mentioned above, as well as all the other great curricular ideas you've previously tried from our magazine or read about and now want to try.

All Teaching K-8 articles, including features, regular columns, cover stories/school visits and author interviews from 1994 to the present are now compiled in a user-friendly, searchable index which will allow you to find the resource you want, the issue date and page number so you can go to your stack of past issues of the magazine for the original article, or buy the online print version.

Follow these easy steps to access the Teaching K-8 archive at www.Teachingk-8.com

1. Visit Teaching K-8's website at www.teachingk-8.com and click on "Magazine Archive" in the menu bar on the left-hand side of the page. Not sure what to look for? The menu bar is shown in the picture at left.

2 To do a simple search of the last two years of Teaching K-8 magazine, you can just type in a keyword for the subject you are looking for and click on "Search."

If you have specific information about the article you want to find, you might get quicker results by conducting an advanced search. Just click on the "Advanced" tab and choose the elements you want to search for (date range, title, author).

3 Once the search is complete, you'll see a list of the resources that matched your search terms. Icons beside each resource indicate the formats) in which you can view each article - text, text with graphics or page image (in PDF format). A short, free-of-charge annotation is given for each resource, along with the date of the issue in which it appeared as well as the page number. At this point, you can go to your magazine shelf and find the issue that has the feature you want. If you don't have that issue, the article can be purchased online to view or print.

4 Register (for free!) with Qpass to obtain a secure user name and password that will enable you to buy articles online. Just click on the format icon from the search list, and choose a purchase option. Once you have registered, you can view and print Teaching K-8 articles with a click of the mouse each time you log in to the archive.

PLEASE NOTE: Current subscribers can access Author Interviews and School Visits, free, by clicking on "Subscription Info" and following the directions to log on to our Web Archive.

5 Be sure to look for the "Links" image throughout our website, which links to articles that you can use as a curricular resource for given topics. If you click on "Technology" in the menu bar that can be found on the left-hand side of any of Teaching K-8's web pages, you'll be taken to a page where you can click on "Web Links" and get as well as search the archive for - Internet Connections for our monthly features.

If you click on "Classroom Activities" in the menu bar on the left-hand side of any of our web pages, and then click "Lessons" on the resulting page, you'll find a listing of search results from the Teaching K-8 online archive that relate to the current issue's curricular topics. For example, the search results for the keyword "March" include such topics as Music in Education, St. Patrick's Day, Women's History Month and Early Childhood.

I hope you enjoy searching, reading and using the wealth of information that's stored in the Teaching K-8 online archive. Happy searching!