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Teaching Resources

NEW YORK TIMES LEARNING NETWORK - Created for students and teachers in grades 3 through 12, The Learning Network is a free news service that provides news summaries, quizzes, and even daily lesson plans.

• NYT Learning Network - http://www.nytimes.com/learning

ONLINE LESSON PLANS - More than 2000 unique lesson plans which have been written and submitted to AskERIC (now called the Educator's Reference Desk) by teachers. If you have a great lesson plan you would like to share with educators all over the world, send it in. A wonderful online resource since 1992.

• AskEric/EDUREF - http://www.eduref.org

TEACHNEToffers lesson plans, teaching tools, a daily teacher- oriented cartoon, and email lists for educators.

• TeachNet - http://www.teachnet.com

Reference Tools

REFDESK - In a library, if you don't know where to look for a reference book, you go to the Reference Librarian. On the Internet, if you don't know where to look for answers, you go to Refdesk.com. At first glance, the sheer amount of useful links on the Refdesk home page can be overwhelming. But it's really quite well organized and useful.

• RefDesk - http://www.refdesk.com

LIBRARY SPOT - Convenient links to popular online Almanacs, Calculators, Dictionaries, Directories, Encyclopedias, Historic Documents, Quotations, Statistics, and Thesauri.

• LibrarySpot - http://www.libraryspot.com

SURFING THE NET WITH KIDS - Barbara Feldman, syndicated newspaper columnist and mother, shares her vision of what's wonderful and educational on the Web for kids. She welcomes parents, kids, teens, grandparents, K-12 teachers, librarians and the incurably curious.

• SurfNetKids - http://www.surfnetkids.com

Homework Helpers

HOMEWORK SPOT - A free homework information portal that features the very best K-12 homework-related sites. With the help of students, parents and teachers, their team of educators, librarians and journalists has scoured the Web to bring you the best resources for English, math, science, history, art, music, technology, foreign language, college prep, health, life skills, extracurricular activities and much more.

• Homework Spot - http://www.homeworkspot.com

INFOPLEASE HOMEWORK CENTER - Find useful information by subject area, develop better writing, note-taking and study skills, and search through previous questions and answers from other students.

• InfoPlease - http://www.infoplease.com/homework

THE KIDS ON THE WEB - This is an excellent site maintained as a labor of love by Internet luminary Brendan Kehoe. Kids on the Web has links for Homework Tools, Educational Sites and much more. You could spend days exploring all these links, and Brendan adds new ones every month.

• Homework Tools - http://www.zen.org/~brendan/kids-homework.html

Homeschool Resources

According to the National Home Education Research Institute, there are over two million homeschooled children in the USA, and this number is growing by 7% per year. If you are currently homeschooling or are considering it, here are some resources that you'll find useful:

• Homeschool World - http://www.home-school.com

• Jon's Homeschool Resources - http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs

• Homeschool Legal Defense Assocation - http://www.hslda.org

School Directories

Looking for a new school, public or private? Here's a cross-referenced listing of ALL public schools, private schools and colleges in the USA here. Each site allows you to browse by state & city, or search for a school by name and/or location. You can get a list of all public schools in Anaheim California, or search for all Catholic schools in Anchorage Alaska. Each directory provides the name, address, phone number and other information about the schools in a city. For public schools, you can see the name of the school district, other schools in that county, grades covered, number of students, full-time teachers, and the student/teacher ratio. For private schools, you'll find the same stats for students and teachers, the type and affiliation, and whether it's co-ed, all boys or all girls.

• All Public Schools - http://www.AllPublicSchools.org

• All Private schools - http://www.AllPrivateSchools.org

Got a favorite site for students or teachers? Post your comments below...