March/April 2000

These online resources can give a boost to humanities teaching and learning:

EDSITEment (www.edsitement.neh.gov/), the "gateway" site of the National Endowment for the Humanities, offers valuable online resources for teaching English, history, art history, and foreign languages, along with lesson plans and in-school activities. The 49 websites are rich in content and the lesson plans are well-written. Educators can also sign up to participate in in-school activities that aid learning through the Internet using the EDSITEment resources. Good parent activities as well.

History Matters (www.historymatters.gmu.edu/) is indispensable for high school and college teachers of U.S. history survey courses. It offers resources such as first-person primary documents that focus on ordinary lives and require students to actively analyze and interpret evidence. Created by scholars at the City University of New York and George Mason University, the site mostly covers the period of 1876-1946, though more materials are added regularly.

The Valley of the Shadow (http:// jefferson.village. virginia.edu/vshadow2/) is an excellent resource for Civil War study. Developed at the University of Virginia, the archive contains thousands of primary resources documenting two Shenandoah Valley communities on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Ideal for student documentary research, the site offers census records, newspapers, photographs, government papers, letters, and diaries, as well as overview documents. Includes online lesson plans.

The federally-sponsored AskERIC (http://ericir.sunsite. syr.edu/) has a virtual library of more than 1,200 lesson plans for teachers on a range of K-12 topics, from language arts lessons such as spelling and phonics to social studies topics such as Oregon Trail and the U.S. Postal Service. In addition, the AskERIC Q&A service promises to answer teacher questions about educational theory or practice within 48 hours using a nationwide network of experts and databases of the latest research.

K-12 teachers will find a rich variety of arts-related lesson plans, curriculum units, and activities at the Kennedy Center's ArtsEdge Curriculum Studio (http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/artsedge.html). Elementary lessons include teaching traditional Japanese songs and learning the history and art of making African masks. One high school curriculum unit explores the theme of monsters in literature, music, and drama.