Greetings Michigan Library Community, Many of our content providers have videos, webinars and research guides to their products that can be found listed by the company's name on MeL under Promotion and Training<http://mel.org/promotions> on the left side of the page. In this MeL Minute, we're going to talk about Gale's On-Demand Tutorials<http://solutions.cengage.com/gale-training/video/research-tools/#video-12884922644>. Gale's tutorials are designed specifically to help students in the classroom or homeschoolers. They start with two sets of Documents and Tools on conducting research and writing reports aimed at Elementary or Middle & High school students. The reference pages at the Elementary level walk younger students through nine steps involved in crafting a report from Choosing a Topic to Judging Information to Citing Your Sources. Included are helpful worksheets for each step to assist the student in thinking about how to complete a particular task. The worksheets ask them a series of questions and help them to think about the process behind the various steps of writing a report. By going through these worksheets, the student has great tools to craft a well-developed report. The reference pages for Middle & High School students are more sophisticated, with tip sheets and worksheets on How to Read and Interpret Graphs, How to Build an Argument (including the best ways to present it and being prepared for questions about your arguments), and How to Write a Thesis Statement, among more than a dozen topics. These are suitable for writers of research papers. They help the student to formulate their ideas and summarize their thinking in preparation of the writing process and then walk them through the development a research paper. This site also has eleven short videos that support research and writing by walking the user through how to use Gale's suite of resources. They cover built-in support such as the highlight and notes feature for almost all Gale products, resources for organizing and keeping track of articles, locating help finding a research topic and then finding reliable information and statistical data as the student explores their topic. When your kids and teens come back from the holidays, be ready for some happy researching! The MeL Minute will take a break the week between Christmas and New Year's but see us back bright and early in January for a special announcement. [cid:image001.jpg@01D37A2F.F18D0980] Brought to you by Deb Renee Biggs and Sonya Schryer Norris, Library Consultants at the Library of Michigan MeL databases are available to Michigan residents or Michigan library access only. MeL Minutes are brought to you by the Library of Michigan. Want more information on MeL? Stay tuned for the next MeL Minute available on many Michigan library listservs, email us at contact@mel.org<mailto:contact@mel.org>, visit http://mel.org<http://mel.org/>, or sign up for the MeL Minute and other Library of Michigan e-mail lists via GovDelivery. We encourage you to share MeL Minutes with your colleagues and networks. Sonya Schryer Norris Library of Michigan 702 W. Kalamazoo St. Lansing, MI 48909 517-373-4457 http://michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan http://mel.org<http://mel.org/> http://michlibrary.org<http://michlibrary.org/> Our collective efforts can help make Michigan a Top 10 education state in 10 years! Here are the goals and strategies: http://mi.gov/top10in10/ [cid:image002.png@01D20444.B08921B0]
