TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: BACK TO SCHOOL

If you're a parent, teacher, home-schooler, grandparent or a student you're gonna love this issue of TOURBUS. It's chock full of great sites with lesson plans, online reference tools and homework helpers!

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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.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning

ASKERIC LESSON PLANS - More than 2000 unique lesson plans which have been written and submitted to AskERIC by teachers. If you have a great lesson plan you would like to share with educators all over the world, send it in.

http://www.askeric.org/Virtual/Lessons

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.

http://www.refdesk.com

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

http://www.libraryspot.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.

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.

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.

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

http://www.zen.org/~brendan/kids-ed.html

That's all for now, I'll see you next time! --Bob Rankin