Stay Up-to-Date in Your Field, K-12

The Search Alert service is a powerful teaching/learning/organizing tool. It is available for (most of) the EBSCO databases. Teachers can use it to develop units or to contribute to their continuous professional development. Students can use it for big research projects or to stay up-to-date on a personal topic of interest.

Let’s say you want to track a topic for an entire school year or want some assistance in finding resources to keep current on a topic you’re teaching. Let’s use the example of a secondary teacher trying to stay up-to-date on African culture. You can create a search profile in most of the EBSCO online databases (except Student Research Center) and then receive an e-mail daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly with new magazine and/or newspaper articles on the topic; or receive an RSS feed.

Follow these steps or watch the silent demonstration video.

Go to http://search.ebscohost.com
--Enter the online database username/password assigned to your school (this step might be optional depending on IP).
--Click Sign In and create your own personal account.
--Click Choose Databases and click the boxes next to the appropriate databases and click Continue. For the African culture search, we’ll choose Advanced Placement Source, History Reference Center, MasterFILE Premier, Newspaper Source, Newspaper Source Plus, TOPICsearch.
--Enter your search topic—note the various search options of full-text, peer reviewed, reading level, journal name, etc.
--Click Search.
--Peruse your results in case the search strategy needs to be changed.
--Click Alert/Save/Share in the blue bar.
--Choose E-mail Alert. Add your e-mail information and select your settings.
--Click Save Alert.