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Summer School: Tools for K-12 Educators

Think teachers really get three months off? Even if they don't set foot in a classroom all summer, teachers are always learning -- picking up skills and knowledge they can share with their students and colleagues. Educators spending the last days of summer surfing the Web can take a few lessons from an exemplary website created for students and teachers in Yamhill County, Ore. The Yamhill County Education Service District provides services to local school districts, including technology support, staff development and training, and special-education programs. The ESD's home page is a great place for teachers -- and Web visitors from outside the local schools -- to share resources, pick up some Internet skills, and master online research. Teachers looking for unique course materials can choose a key word, grade level and medium (video, CD-ROM, etc.) and run a forms-based search of the ESD's media catalog. A music teacher, for instance, can type the query "jazz" and come up with a K-5 video called "Ty's One-Man Band" that turns kids on to rap, doo-wop, jazz and salsa. Clicking on the results brings up a description of the item and a form that allows authorized users from the district to order it for classroom use. Individual schools can link their home pages to the site; there's also a support page where the schools' Internet coordinators can download the software they need. The ESD posts its computer class schedules for students, teachers and the local community -- it also has converted the training handouts it created into Adobe Acrobat files. Look for easy introductions to Netscape, Eudora, Web design and other topics. If you're ready for hands-on, there's a handy collection of Internet tools. Just click on icons: basic and advanced tools, helper apps, chat/audioconferencing, and compression utilities. And in case you don't know what gadgets like Anarchie, Sparkle or DropStuff do, you can grab a quick intro here before downloading them. The Places to Go page categorizes online educational resources into areas such as Art, Computers, Foreign Language and Special Education. All the links are annotated, so you know if they're what you're looking for. The Search the Net page runs a JavaScript program that lets you put four search engines (including Yahoo! and Infoseek) to work for you.

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