If you want to a see a blank look on a student’s face, ask him about the Dewey Decimal library classification system. For better or for worse, the Internet often becomes an alternative to a library’s card catalogs. But how can you trust what you read on the Web?
Learning where to go and how to appropriately use information that is on the Internet can be challenging to both parents and students. The following is a look at some of the most comprehensive—and reliable—educational Web sites a student can bookmark and use to research school projects and homework assignments.
MSN Encarta
The free MSN Encarta site features more than 4,500 articles pooled from Microsoft Encarta, the award-winning electronic reference library, and comes with dictionaries, maps, fast facts, interactive quizzes, handy homework tools, and more.
HowStuffWorks
Ever wanted to know why earthquakes happen? How CD burners work? What the sun is made of? These questions, and a large amount of others related to computers/electronics, automobiles, science, entertainment, and people, are all answered at this award-winning Web site. Simply type a query into the search window or peruse the topics by category. Extras include free newsletters, surveys, and printable versions of all answers.
Wikipedia.org – online encyclopedia
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. Anyone can read articles, and also can edit them. However the articles on Sri Lanka are very few, so can can become the first one to add articles on some subjects.
Wikipedia is not a source so reliable you can cite it in real academic papers. However, it houses a wealth of information – more than a million user-written articles, and that depth makes Wikipedia a good starting point for research on new topics.
