Web Watch

This month's Web Watch is CNNfyi.com> teaching tools. The site is a great place to procure references, gain up-to-date information about current events, and develop ideas for how to teach them.

Two unique aspects of this site are the weekly Ask an Expert feature and the ongoing interactive student activities. In Ask an Expert, participants submit questions about content, teaching methods or educational issues, which are then answered by a teacher or professor. Weekly discussions are archived and are particularly strong in science, social studies, media, and current school issues.

Recent interactive activities for students and teachers include a virtual tour of the International Space Station and an online project in which participants constructed a spacecraft for a trip to Mars.

The site also features

• An extensive calendar with upcoming CNN programming and national education conferences
• Tons of links to reference materials like thesauri, dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases, as well as educational sites of interest
• Extensive archives of lesson plans, as well as student and teacher Web pages

Most of the lesson plans, texts, and topics seem more suited for middle and high school students, although some could be adapted for lower grades. A caution: This is a commercial site and as such, must be used selectively. For instance, some links promising reading and language arts lesson plans take you to an extensive Harcourt Brace site that is little more than a promotion for the company's texts. The site is mousetrapped, making it difficult to escape.

Ann Watts Pailliotet