Expanding your Searching Toolkit

Teachers design Internet Research Guide sites as portals for their students who are researching particular topics on the Internet. These guide sites accomplish two important goals: They provide students with starting places for their Internet searches, and they eliminate the need for them to type in URL's directly. Guiding students to pre-selected sites on their topics enables them to quickly find many other quality sites, just by following the links. Creating links with correct URL's prevents the common problem of error messages and confusing excursions into irrelevant Web sites.

Examples of Internet Research Guides

Search IQ Subject Directory - If you go to this site you will find a subject directory of Search engines listed by category. This site also contains a "Hot List" of the top ranked search engines of every type.

http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/subjects/

eNature.com- The complete guide to over 4,800 North American plants and animals, with detailed descriptions and photographs.

http://www.eNature.com/

SciNet - Einstein never had it so easy. Search over 88,000 science listings along with science news.

http://www.scinet.cc/

Ecology and Marine Biology Resources

http://www.atlantic.net/~rolovett/Eco.html

Scientific American Editor's Selection from the Web -SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN's editors come across a steady stream of interesting, informative, entertaining--and sometimes unexpected--sites on the World Wide Web. We wanted to share with our readers some of our favorite locations.

http://www.sciam.com/bookmarks/editselect.html

Invisibleweb.com - The search engine of search engines. Powerful list directory of science sites organized by sub categories This link takes you to the sciences sub directory.

http://invisibleweb.com/main.asp?sessionid={3E764866-8140-11D5-B57A-009027A35E71}&action=SETGLOBVAR:IWHierarchyID,690

Mill Pond Intermediate School's Research Hotlinks - An example of providing students with research and reference guides to kick off research projects.

http://www.ycs.wednet.edu/millpond/index.html

Publishing on the Internet

The Internet is a powerful publishing tool for collaborative class projects. Much like any collaborative research project, a Web site is, by nature, a collection of interconnected parts with a common theme. Class project sites work well around topics with multidisciplinary interest and can include images, text, and even multimedia elements. Upon completion and publication on the Web, students often feel a strong sense of accomplishment. Projects created as PowerPoint or HyperStudio documents can be saved as Web Pages (html documents). Many word processing applications also have the ability to save documents as Web Pages.

The following is a good examples of a class project site.

Mr. Bagley's Eleventh Grade American History Class

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/1545/

Examples of Class Homepage- the classroom homepage can be the central hub for information on your classroom. Be warned that to be effective a class homepage must be updated frequently.

Jordan Elementary School: Class Homepages

JORDAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: 2000-2001 Class Homepages To "check" a class

homepage just click on the underlined teachers' names!

http://www.mpsaz.org/~jordan/classes.html

Ms. Busekist and Ms. Holloway first grade class homepage

http://schools.wcpss.net/DurantElementary/sarah/

Quick Links