NEW YORK, April 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Scholastic, the global children's publishing, education and media company, today announced the launch of a re-engineered and re-designed version of Grolier Online from Scholastic Library Publishing with new content and digital research tools to meet the needs of 21st Century learners and educators.

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Grolier Online now includes separate portals for elementary, middle and high school students, adult public library patrons, and librarians and educators. The Grolier Online experience is tailored for each user with an enhanced search engine that delivers articles, maps, and videos adjustable to a wide range of reading levels for students, and a dashboard for librarians and educators filled with professional development tools, lesson plans and other resources.

The new Grolier Online continues its history of bringing the most up-to-date and authoritative content to students and educators in the formats they prefer. Grolier was one of the first comprehensive reference sources in the educational market to go completely digital in 1997. The latest upgrade continues to expand on the program's robust bank of multimedia content that is updated daily by a team of Scholastic editors, and provides students of all ages with the most comprehensive and compelling content and current events from around the world.

With the new Grolier Online, students in grades 3 and up get even more help with school assignments and projects with:

• An updated selection of more than 120,000 articles, arranged by reading level and aligned to national and state standards, as well as alignments to the Common Core standards – coming this summer.
• More than 340,000 web links vetted by editors.
• A revamped search engine that allows users to search for content according to Lexile® or reading level.
• A database of 1,100+ international newspapers in 73 languages representing 195 countries.
• More than 1,200 clickable maps connected to in-depth articles from the most remote regions in the world.
• A collection of debate questions and current event topics to help build critical thinking skills.

The backbone of the new Grolier Online is its enhanced search capabilities, which provide access to users from eight databases: three general reference encyclopedias (The New Book of Knowledge, Grolier Multimedia, and Encyclopedia Americana), four specialty encyclopedias (Amazing Animals of the World, The New Book of Popular Science, and America the Beautiful, Lands & Peoples), and one Spanish language encyclopedia (La Nueva Enciclopedia Cumbre). The search tool pulls articles, videos, maps, and other multimedia depending upon your custom collection.

"The new Grolier Online has been customized and reformatted to provide each user with age-appropriate content that is tailored to their unique needs," said Hugh Roome, President of Scholastic Library Publishing. "In today's ever-changing world with the 24 hour news cycle, it's critical that children, adults, librarians and teachers have access to the most relevant and up-to-date news from around the world. With thousands of new articles arranged by reading level, educational video, and teaching material, the new Grolier Online will provide them with limitless resources for endless exploration."

Scholastic Library Publishing is a leading provider of digital and print products for public and school libraries – delivering content and learning solutions that are proven to help raise achievement. Scholastic Library Publishing offers a suite of digital tools, including BookFlix for young readers, TrueFlix, which helps students build content-area knowledge in science and social studies, and Grolier Online, America's premier online reference source. Scholastic Library Publishing also offers high-interest non-fiction from the classic Franklin Watts and Children's Press imprints.

For more information about Scholastic, visit our media room http://mediaroom.scholastic.com.  

SOURCE Scholastic