Research changes with new EBSCO Explora system
Administration has been beyond excited to announce the new EBSCO Explora research platform is officially live for all students access. EBSCO (Elton B. Stephens Company) provides a safe space for students to conduct their research for all school projects and assignments. There are nine different databases available within this system ranging from middle school through high school students.
“Last year, just before Christmas, administration made the decision that we would go from blacklisting internet sites to whitelisting,” high school assistant principal Mrs. Kim Pfaller said.
Blacklisting is to block a website when administration found one not fitting for TKA students, while whitelisting blocks every website and only allows permitted ones within the settings.
“It really took away from students being able to research because teachers couldn’t keep up with all the places they needed to go to do research for their projects and papers,” Mrs. Pfaller said.
After experiencing various problems and complaints from both students and teachers, administration knew they needed to make a change.
“I took over the curriculum at the end of last year, and we have a budget, and we realized that with this money, we really wanted to create a way for teachers to give students research that was safe,” Mrs. Pfaller said.
Finding the balance between safety and convenience is not easy, which is why many schools are shifting toward a technology free learning environment.
“The biggest hurdle for admin is just that EBSCO is a massive company, and you’ve got to realize in this day and age, every school has this trouble,” Mrs. Kim Pfaller said. “King’s felt the need that if we’re going to be using technology, it’s got to be purposeful. We started with this at the end of May, and just last week we were able to get it operational for our school. That was not a lack on any of our part — it’s just getting them on our time frame when they had so many schools hitting them up for this.”
When choosing a research database, administration carefully considered our Christian worldview and our desire to research current events from this perspective.
“There’s no Christian databases out there that would work for us because we needed research for geography, science, literature and history,” Mrs. Pfaller said.“We chose EBSCO because, even though it is not a Christian database, they offer age appropriate options and allows our IT department to turn off portions of the databases that do not align with our biblical worldview.”
The TKA Administration has the ability to control the settings past the restrictions EBSCO sets. Therefore, if EBSCO allows something that TKA is not happy with, administration has the ability to go into the database settings and turn it off.
“I think the win is going to come more when teachers and students get in and actually use it, to see if this is going to solve our problem,” Mrs. Pfaller said. “I feel like we don’t really know the win yet — we don’t have a lot of teachers assigning research papers or research projects yet — but I really hope that it works out.”
EBSCO Explora is still very new to the school, so the administration is still observing how it is working for students and teachers.
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