Education Reporters Should Visit High School Hub

By: Charles Bowen Labor Day weekend means the end of the summer and -- listen for the groans in your newsroom -- the beginning of a new school year. Looking for a last-minute back-to-school feature you can put together quickly? Look to the Web.

A site called High School Hub, developed by Wanda G. Wojcik and Dyann K. Schmidel, is a wonderful collection of links designed to help high school students looking for all kinds of online resources, from school-specific subjects to reference works. The site is refreshingly currently. There is a daily news quiz (provided by The New York Times) and the "Today in History" feature from the Library of Congress's American Memory project.

Perhaps of interest to your young readers, once they get over the end-of-summer shock, will be the "Homework Help" section, organized by subject and each containing several dozen links to features such as an online table of chemical elements and famous American trials. The site even contains pastimes and diversions, such as word puzzles and a typing challenge.

To check it out, visit http://highschoolhub.org/hub/hub.cfm, where a no-nonsense introductory screen provides links to more than a half dozen key categories of material, including:

* Homework Help, with resources for biology, chemistry, earth science, English, global studies, mathematics, physics, U.S. history, and world languages.

* Current Events, including news issues, science "Why Files," "Word of the Day," and more.

* Learning Activities, among them chemical elements; aids in French, German, Italian, and Spanish; anatomy guides; SAT and vocabulary work.

* Reference Resources and Tools, with links to atlases, calculators, conversion tables, dictionaries, medical information, social issues, translators, weather data, world facts, and ZIP codes.

* Games & Puzzles, including scrambled words, logic puzzles, spelling games, typing challenges, and world flags.

Featured Topics, such as art and music, colleges and careers, community services, study strategies, and teen health.

Another useful section is "Hub Directories," found in the lower right corner of the introductory screen. Here you can find examples of Web pages created by teachers K-12 around the country, the Web sites of various high schools and middle schools in the nation, and the sites of public libraries.

And if you write about the site in your news columns or Internet features, you might want to mention that High School Hub has four sister sites: Kids Hub for elementary and middle school students, Quiz Hub, which offers hundreds of online interactive learning quizzes designed for K-12 students, Spelling Hub, an interactive spelling program for grades 5 through 8 and Teachers Hub, a curriculum resource for classroom teachers, homeschooling parents, library media specialists, and instructional technology coordinators.

Meanwhile, here are some other online educational resources that your back-to-school staff might want to bookmark:

1. Getting up-to-date education figures used to be quite a chore. Get help with a powerful statistical database from the National Center for Education Statistics (http://www.nces.ed.gov), the online extension of the federal agency charged with collecting and analyzing data related to schools in the United States and other nations.

2. Education Index (http://www.educationindex.com) offers more than 50 alphabetized subjects that are linked on the resulting page, ranging from agriculture, anthropology, and archaeology to theology, transportation, and women's studies.

3. Child Trends (http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org), a national leader in the field of children-related statistics for more than two decades, offers an online database to cover education, health, income, family, and more.
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