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January
27, 2003
Portals to the World
http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html
Portals
to the World contains selective links providing authoritative, in-depth
information about the nations and other areas of the world. The resources are
arranged by country, with the links for each sorted into a wide range of
broad categories such as business, culture, education, geography, government,
history, religion, society, and others. The links were selected using Library
of Congress selection criteria. There are links to all the nations of the
world. This site is an online atlas
for those who are studying world history, geography, cultures, comparative
religion, and other topics in social studies.
This is also an excellent site for keeping up with current events.
January 20, 2003
The Nine Planets
http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/nineplanets.html
Interplanetary
spacecraft have revolutionized the study of the planets. This website provides a multimedia program
containing the history, mythology, and current scientific knowledge about
each of the planets and moons in our solar system. Each page contains pictures and information
from NASA explorations. Some pages
include movies and audio clips. Many
of the pages provide links to additional information about each planet and
moon. This website is an excellent
resource for science classes in middle and high schools. It also can help parents who are helping
their children with those science lessons.
January 13, 2003
The WebQuest Page
http://webquest.sdsu.edu/
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or
all of the information used by learners is drawn from the Web. WebQuests are
designed to use learners' time well, to focus on using information rather
than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of
analysis, synthesis and evaluation. This site is designed to serve as a
resource for teachers who want to use the WebQuest
model to teach with the web. The
“Training Materials” section has a very comprehensive set of tools to help
teachers understand and use WebQuests. The “Examples” section has hundreds of
existing WebQuests for every content area. Teachers can use the examples to help build
their own WebQuests – or they can just take the
examples and use those. This site is
an absolute essential for teachers who are integrating web resources into
their lessons – from Art to Zoology, and everything in between.
January 6, 2003
International Children’s Digital Library
http://www.icdlbooks.org
The
International Children’s Digital Library provides free access to thousands of
children’s books from hundreds of cultures worldwide. The site currently has more than 200 titles
from more than 27 cultures in 15 different languages. When the project is completed in less than
five years, the site will contain about 10,000 books for children aged 3 to
13. The site offers indices by title,
author, subject, culture, language, and other categories. Several U.S. publishers, including Random
House, Scholastic, and HarperCollins, have contributed titles to the
collection. Publishers worldwide –
like the Finnish Institute for Children’s Literature and the Zimbabwe Book
Council – have also made contributions.
Teachers and parents can access and print the books for children. The books can also be read online. As one student pointed out, “The book I want
is never checked out.” The site
currently requires Java, which can be downloaded from the entry screen. It also requires a high-speed connection to
the Internet (DSL, T-1, cable modem, etc).
By the summer of 2003, books will be available without special
software applications (such as Java) and will be accessible from the most
basic computers using a standard phone modem.
The site cannot currently be accessed through a standard phone modem.
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