Encarta 2003 Premium

By Allan Jackson

The quiet part of the school year is over by now and the work is going to be piling up until the end of the year. Microsoft's Encarta Premium Suite 2003 is a great buy for reducing the strain on pupils who are continually having to do projects and parents who are having to answer questions they haven't got the foggiest idea about.
Encarta is apparently the best-selling encyclopaedia in the world and I'm not surprised to hear it. The Premium version contains an encyclopaedia with over 100000 articles, a full atlas of the world, a thesaurus, an English dictionary, multilingual dictionaries with translations from French, Italian, Spanish and German to English and back again.
All is not lost if Encarta hasn't got what you're looking for because it gives you access to a lot more information through links to myriads of websites which have been selected by Encarta staffers. The brilliant Researcher tool makes it easy to collect information together from Encarta and the Internet and output it, with proper attribution, as a editable document to form the basis of a project.
Encarta Premium lives on five CD-ROM discs and you do have do a good bit of swapping of the discs if you don't take advantage of the feature which allows you to copy the whole thing to your hard drive. Some might say Encarta makes research too easy and that, because the output is a computer file, it is too easy for pupils to share their projects. I think that research is research however its done and that you can overcome the other problem by making a rule that pupils must present their projects orally as well which will make them memorise the facts at least.