1. Well, there are a lot of topics to choose from, but I finally picked 'International Adoption.' What is nice about the Topic Overview section as well as the Pros and Cons is that someone could come to the topic with very little knowledge on it and begin to learn more about it before they do further research. The Research Tools also gave great information. I liked the timeline feature plus the statistics tool was nice because it had charts describing what they were saying. With the articles section, I thought it was nice that they gave the first few sentences of the article so someone would know if that was a link they wanted. There is a lot of really well organized material and articles here that someone could do a lot of research with.
2. Under Curriculum Pathfinders, I chose Social Studies. One of the first things that I notice are the research ideas that they give. I clicked on "Korean War," and the amount of information is almost overwhelming. I think coming to this site with specific ideas of what you need would be easier because there is a lot of different information. I clicked on some of the links on the side such as the primary sources, timelines and world maps. Again, knowing what you want and being able to specifically search for it seems to be the easiest way to navigate this site, but having access to all those maps, diaries, letters, political cartoons, etc. makes this a great source.
Thanks for your comments, SoDak. We like Issues Researcher's balanced approached to current controversial topics. Teachers have told us they like using this product because it gives solid information that is not blocked on school networks. Teachers have also liked the Note Organizer and the My Analysis features, which help students organize their thoughts and complete a project step-by-step.
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