DK Find Out! Fun facts for kids on animals, earth, history and more. An educational website created by Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2015. Available at http://www.dkfindout.com/us/
Annotation: DK has done it again! This time, instead of a print edition of the well-designed and visually-oriented layouts of informational text that they are known for, the publisher has expanded to the internet and created a resource for curious kids who want to "find out more".
Summary: This is a cleanly designed website which is still in its beta phase, but even in this early stage, shows great promise as a resource that educates children about the world around them in such an engaging way that they won't even notice they are learning. With major categories such as "Animals and Nature", "Human Body", "Math", and "English", there is something here for every interest.
As shown in the screen shot below, the graphics are labeled with interactive buttons which, when clicked, open additional content or descriptive text.
There are fun quizzes to test your knowledge on particular subjects, videos, and photo galleries to explore. Currently, the site is available for educators, but there is a module coming soon for parents and children to use at home. There will also be a feature to save your favorite content for later reference that is currently in development.
Critical Evaluation: While this web encyclopedia is geared towards children at the high end of our target age range (and even older), it is a wonderful resource for the factual-oriented young person, and worthy of mention. DK's high standards for photography and overall design, as found in their print publications, are present here as well in the high-quality graphics and clean layout.
While DK Find Out! is offered through the internet, it is a secure site, and safe for children to use. The website is also available at no cost, which allows school, libraries, and families of all economic levels to have the same ability to access the content, an important factor to consider when combating the digital divide.
Also of note for educators is the curriculum-oriented content with suggested projects and assignments that relate to the subject matter on the website. It is evident that the developers of this site have put a great deal of thought into making it highly attractive to children, as well as practical and helpful to educators. A link to the DK Find Out! site would be a valuable addition to a school or library homepage or list of homework resources.
Age or Interest Level: Ages 6 and Up
Awards: ---
Why Included? This would be very useful in a school or library environment for children to reference particular topics for an assignment, or simply to browse the website for whatever strikes their fancy that day.
Muzzy Online. A language course for children created by Early Advantage, [n.d.]. Available on the websites of many American libraries.
Annotation: Travel with Muzzy, the clock-eating green monster, as he flies around the world, meets many interesting characters, and eventually ends up saving the day.
Summary: Muzzy began in 1986 as an animated film created by the BBC. It was later adapted to become a language course for children, and has now been updated to include interactive features in an online environment. Many American libraries offer Muzzy Online through their websites, free of charge to their patrons.
Muzzy loves to eat metal objects, clocks being his favorite, and as he lands his spacecraft in Gondoland, he meets a cast of characters including a king, a queen, and a princess, as well as a gardener who is in love with the princess, and an evil scientist. The story grows from there and involves an elopement, jail time, and computer clones.
While the plot sounds very mature, it is presented in an age appropriate manner. The movie segments are accompanied by language lessons and vocabulary building exercises that present the same words again and again, but in different contexts. It is thought that children learn language best when it is immersive and repetitious, and Muzzy Online utilizes this approach.
With eight world languages to choose from, two levels of difficulty, and the option of subtitles, the Muzzy Online site is incredibly versatile and offers a broad range of interactive language experiences.
Critical Evaluation: Muzzy (on DVD) and Muzzy Online are internationally recognized as the number one language course for children. Millions of children have learned a foreign language while enjoying animated videos and vocabulary exercises.
There are many glowing reviews and success stories featured on the Early Advantage website, which demonstrate the solid results that participants in the program have achieved. However, while the program was updated in 2013 with all-new animation and audio, the animation, voices, and music appear and sound dated, particularly in contrast to other current interactive apps or computer animated media for children.
Also, the layout of the various screens (which in many cases feature an active window within two larger frames, which are overlaid on an animated background) is distracting and draws attention away from the course content. Due to this overly complicated layout, there is often an awkward screen break which requires scrolling down to reach the area of the page where a mouse click is required to advance to the next segment of the lesson.
A redesign of the page layouts, and an update to the visual and audio portions of the course, would result in a more sophisticated and up to date presentation, which would be much more fitting to a language learning tool that has achieved such a high degree of international success.
Age or Interest Level: Ages 2 to 7
Awards: Parents Choice Gold Award; iParenting Media Award;
English Speaking Union Award
Why Included? In an increasingly global society, children who have foreign language skills will have a better chance of success in their career opportunities as adults. Muzzy Online is a language tool that public and school libraries can offer their youngest patrons and their families, in order to give them a head start towards meeting the demands of the future.