Database. CultureGrams Kids Edition

by ProQuest

"Since its beginnings in 1974, the aim of CultureGrams has been to foster understanding and appreciation of the world's countries and peoples by creating and publishing excellent content. Today the CultureGrams series is one of the most trusted and widely used cultural reference and curriculum products in the education, government, and non-profit arenas. In 2004, the CultureGrams product line was acquired by ProQuest, a global leader in collecting, organizing, and distributing value-added information to researchers, faculty, and students in over 160 countries.

Today, educators, librarians, and administrators in more than 30,000 K-12 schools rely on ProQuest to:

* Provide comprehensive, easy-to-use educational resources to power learning and increase student achievement
* Enhance curriculum with age-appropriate, high-quality digital content from primary and secondary sources spanning thousands of titles and multiple media types
* Provide landmark articles and electronic resources that illuminate all aspects of the most vital issues of our time
* Inspire students to reach their fullest potential in the core curricula of Language Arts, Social Sciences, the Sciences, and Mathematics; and secondary curricula including the Arts, Multicultural Studies, and Technology and Vocational Education

ProQuest products are designed to support the widespread, integrated, sustained, and effective (WISE) use of technology to help K-12 schools develop educators' skills and improve student achievement at every grade level."

http://online.culturegrams.com/main/a...

Reviews

[Kristel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A database that focuses on providing content about a country’s population, famous people, history, culture and much more, this database could be a social studies teacher’s dream. Upper elementary school students navigate to the country they wish to learn about by clicking on a region of the world map, for example Africa, and then click on the country from the new map that results. CultureGrams is provided through ProQuest, a successful, commercial content-aggregator and publisher. This accounts for the slick interface and the lack of advertisements on the website. The statistical data usually comes from The World Factbook or reports from the United Nations. CultureGrams editors write the reports found in the Kids Edition and these are vetted by reviewers with extensive knowledge and/or are native citizens of the country in question. These reports are reviewed and updated twice a year to ensure current and correct information. When viewing the online database, information is packed into the webpage but in colorful ways to draw the attention of young users. Some content has less scholastic value than others, such as recipes, but could provide ideas for a world cultures fair or a library storytime. The greatest flaw of this edition is that every country does not have a report or information. The editors are adding countries yearly; however, these countries are not even listed by name on the maps as though they do not exist because CultureGrams does not have a page on them. The database would be improved by labeling every country on the map and simply graying out the names of those without reports as of yet. Thus, young users will at least know the geographic location of the county on the world map. As the database is accessible for free through Michigan eLibrary, this is highly recommended for public libraries.