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Kids InfoBits Search Tips

Kids InfoBits is a content-rich resource featuring a mobile-responsive, modern, inviting interface with continuously updated content appropriate for elementary school students. This resource helps kids advance research skills and gain comfort with database searching. With full-text proprietary content from Blackbirch Press, UXL, and more, the information is reliable and geared to fit the needs of today’s young learners.

How to Use Kids InfoBits On the home page, you will find the following search options:

o You can pick a topic from the Subject Topic Tree Images.

o Use the Basic Search at the top of the page to search on your

topic.

o Advanced Search is best for finding something specific, such as

the title of an article or an author; click the Advanced Search

button from the banner.

Subject Topic Tree Images Choose the subject that best suits the topic you wish to research from the images on the home page. You’ll be given a narrower topic to pick and then a list of topics. Choose whatever you like to receive results.

Clicking on the Info icon will give you facts

about the topic.

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Basic Search To use Basic Search, simply type in the topic you want. You’ll notice search suggestions become available as you type; these can help with spelling or lead you to a similar topic.

Advanced Search

You’ll find Advanced Search in the banner. Some popular uses for Advanced Search are:

o Limiting your search by Content or Lexile level

o Finding a specific article, when you already know the title,

publication name or author

o Retrieving all articles from a certain journal

o Combining your terms with Boolean operators and index fields

You can limit your search by date range, document type, content or Lexile level, etc. In the example to the right, we’re perfroming a Keyword search on ROSA PARKS and limiting our results to Basic Content Level.

Results By choosing a topic from the home page or by performing any search, you will be taken to the results list. For this example to the left, we searched on weather. Results are grouped by Content Types (Books, Pictures, Magazines, News) and show a few hits from each. Click on the hit count number for each Content Type to see all the results for that group. You’ll notice each article gives an icon to indicate its Content Level; see the key below. These will help you find the appropriate articles for your audience. You can also view this key by clicking the Content Levels Key at the top of your results list. Lexile Reading Levels are provided for recent Magazine and News articles as well.

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Content Type View Content Type View allows you to view all results for the chosen content type as well as filter those results by Content Level, Subject, Document Type, and Publication Title. Results sort by Relevance; you can change this by selecting another option like Publication Date from the Sort by drop box.

Article View To view any article, click on its title. You’ll find several other useful tools in Article View. o Listen provides an audio reading of

the article.

o Citation Tools provides an MLA or APA citation to copy to your bibliography.

o Email documents to yourself or others.

o Download to your computer for later use.

o Print to a local printer.

o Highlights and Notes important sections and make notes. (Lasts for your session only but can be exported to Google Drive – see Google Integration)

o Save to folder for your session.

o Share on social media.

o Translate Article into a variety of languages. Note: this is a machine translation.

o Related Subjects will provide related topics to the article you’re viewing.

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Google Integration Gale has partnered with Google to provide two user workflow tools: Google Drive and Google Classroom. Users can sign in to their Google Accounts from the banner of Kids InfoBits.

Users can save documents to their Google Drive by clicking the Download tool in any document. They’ll be offered the option to download to Google Drive and their document will save to a Google Drive folder named Kids InfoBits. They can then edit and share the document.

Schools that have implemented Google Apps for Education can take advantage of Google Classroom. A Google Classroom icon is available in the banner of the page. Teachers can use Kids InfoBits to find digital content to share with students in Assignments and Announcements within their Google Classroom courses. Simply click the Google Classroom link and it will guide the teacher through setting up an Assignment or Announcement to be displayed on their course page with a link to the content the teacher has chosen.

Bookmark Gale’s Bookmark tool gives a persistent URL that provides instant access to content you want to share with others. Simply click the Bookmark icon from the banner when you find something you’d like to share and copy and paste the URL provided. You can share URLs on websites, social media, LMS tools – basically anywhere you can link a URL! It’s a great way to draw users into Kids InfoBits for content you want them to see.

More You’ll find more help for using Kids InfoBits in the More menu in the upper right hand corner.

o Educator Resources will provide tutorials, an explanation of reading levels, help for writing reports, and more.

o Help provides instruction on using Kids InfoBits.

o Title List will provide a complete list of sources in Kids InfoBits.

o Search History provides a history of the searches performed in your session.

o Highlights and Notes provides a list of your highlights and notes from your session. You can cite, e-mail,

download, or print all your highlights and notes at once.

o My Folder holds the documents you’ve saved in your session. You can print, e-mail, download, or cite all the

items in My Folder at once.

If you require further assistance with Kids InfoBits, please consult Help or contact Gale’s Technical Support at 1-800-877-4253.