Name:The Educators' Reference Desk
Brief Description of the Site:
This site continues most of the work of the U.S. Dept. of Education's AskERIC service, which was discontinued as of 12/19/03. The site offers: The Resource Collection, clickable links to some 3,000 resources on educational issues, such as "Counseling," "Educational Technology," "Specific Populations," etc.; The Lesson Plan Collection, with lessons in just about every subject area and the ability to search by grade level and topic; The ERIC database, which offers abstracts of over 1 million documents and articles related to education; and an archive of 200 answers to practitioners' questions about education. The only thing missing is the live question/answer service, but there's enough material here to make up for its loss.
How to use the site:
Obviously this is a great resource for practicing educators, educational theorists, pre-service teachers, parents, and just about anyone involved in education today. For example, typing "No Child Left Behind" into the search box of the Resource page brings up nine clickable links, each leading to even more information. Or go to the Lesson Plan collection, type in "transportation" as the key word, and you will have access to a GEM-powered search tool that will retrieve a trove of possibilities.
