WONDEROPLIS

In today’s library of inquiry-based learning and makerspaces, it’s “wonder”ful to have a website such as Wonderopolis (http://wonderopolis.org) where students can begin exploring their journey of learning. Sponsored by the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL), Wonderopolis is unique in that children, parents, teachers, schools, and families all contribute to the content. Each “wonder of the day” includes a video and an article with speech enabled by ReadSpeaker. Students may click highlighted words within an article to find other related wonders, take a brief multiple-choice quiz, vote from one to five stars, and leave a comment.

An archive of wonders can be searched by most recent, most popular, grade level (pre K-12), subject matter, and category. Students can submit their own wonder, with their parents’ cosigning if they are younger than thirteen, without creating an account. The Educator Resource section consists of blog posts and a twitter feed. Wonderopolis is the perfect springboard for students who need inspiration for developing their own questions for research. Teachers can use this site as both starter and enrichment activities.

WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY

The world is at your fingertips at the World Digital Library (http://www.wdl.org/en), a cooperative project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, as well as other organizations around the world. Visitors can access books, journals, manuscripts, maps, photos, films, and sound recordings by location, time period, subject matter, type of artifact, original language, and contributing institution. They can also embark on a cultural journey through timelines, interactive maps, and themes, and access additional information such as bibliographic and publication information, physical description, topic, and related subjects.

These primary source artifacts could easily be incorporated into history, art, and world language classes. In fact, students and teachers can navigate this site in various languages in both written form and text-to-voice conversion using the embedded ReadSpeaker program (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish).

SPECIAL NOTE: Both Wonderopolis and the World Digital Library employ ReadSpeaker technology, available in over 30 languages and 100 voices. Other features include the ability to vary reading speed, highlighting text, and downloading sound as an mp3 file.