New digital resources available courtesy of the California State Library

California public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade have new digital resources available to them courtesy of the California State Library.  Why is this significant? California is one of the last states to offer these types of resources to every student. Until now, individual schools and districts paid for students to access quality digital resources appropriate for academic use.

What are these resources?  They are commonly referred to as Databases.
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"A library database is an indexed collection of magazine, journal, newspaper articles, abstracts, and other information, which has been checked for accuracy and reliability by publishers and then licensed for distribution in online/electronic format. Many of the sources included in the database come from known print sources that publishers sell to the databases.” (CSL - California’s K-12 Online Content Project http://bit.ly/2C5UOa1)

There are three major providers for students/staff to use:

Brittanica/Escolar is an online encyclopedia for students at all levels in English and Spanish. 

ProQuest offers seven different databases targeted to different groups.

• CultureGrams – Concise cultural information on countries around the world.
• eLibrary – General reference aggregation of periodical and digital media content with editorial guidance for novice researchers.
• ProQuest Central Student – A database of millions of articles from more than 10,000 full-text scholarly journals.
• SIRS Discoverer – Selected content for beginning researchers, especially elementary and middle school students and educators.
• SIRS Issues Researcher – Curriculum-aligned database of content organized by complex issues, ideally for middle and high school students and educators.
• Research Companion – Information literacy tools and tutorials to help develop critical thinking.
• School and Educators Complete – eBook subscription database of over 12,000 titles that supports English Language Arts, Science, Math, Social Studies, Health, Physical Education, Information Literacy and Technology.

Teaching Books offers a variety of lesson plans, videos and other resources to enrich fiction and non fiction reading.

All of these resources are available on MUSD campuses without a password needed. Students/families accessing at home can login with a MUSD student email to an overview document at bit.ly/2nSBNhr to see passwords for Brittanica and Proquest access off campus. These passwords are unique to MUSD and cannot be posted publicly per the contracts with the providers. Teachers may post in Google classroom or other sites provided they are not accessible via a public website.