The WebEd Curriculum Links page is essentially an informal directory of web sites that teachers, school media specialists, and librarians can use to support curriculum and instruction in their classes. Bob Koechley, the Belleville Schools District Librarian, started the directory in 1993 and has maintained it on a regular basis. It is hosted by the state of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction. The directory is broken into some general topical categories, beginning with new sites, and ranges from “Search Tools” to “Fun places to visit” to “News” before getting into the curriculum categories. These include “Early Childhood”, “Parents, Parenting, Child Care, Community”, “Teachers, Schools, Curriculum Reform, Standards”, “Art”, “Science”, “Math”, “Multicultural Assets”, “History”, “Writing”, “Music”, “Mexico, Spanish, Spain, Hispanic”, “Food, Cooking, Family and Consumer Education”, “After HS: College/Career Info”, “Sports”, “General Interests: Schools”, “Global Email Pen‐Pals”, “Fun/Useful/Temporary”, “Cars, Auto Companies, Associations, Driving”, “Internet”, and “Buying Computers, Software.” Apparently, at the end of the document, the author has included additional sites, in no order, that he has added but not placed in a topical category.
Once in the curriculum category, the most useful subcategories for identifying quality sites are “Science” and “Multicultural Assets.” The “Science” category ranges from links to other directories to primary source data pages. It includes excellent resources such as Body Atlas, the SciEd lists, the NASA Astronaut Biographies, and the United States Geological Survey. Another excellent category is “Multicultural Assets”, which is roughly divided into African‐American, Native Americans, Mexico & Hispanic Americans, and then a catchall subsection that includes other countries and peoples (India, Islamic countries, human rights groups, etc.).
The entire directory totals 467 web sites. There are very few helpful annotations, but some links do have a quick comment. Some sites have a grade of A or A+ listed. Athough this may have been a way of rating the sites at the beginning, currently very few include a grade at all. The sites are not organized by any ratings or even listed alphabetically or by subject within the categories. It seems that they were added in order by date visited. The page has a few mistakes in it (items listed twice, spelling, capitalization) and could use some housecleaning (many sites have moved, and a random sampling found 10% dead links). In addition, the layout, format, and category development could use some work;but it is obvious that the author has visited all the sites and thought them worthy of use for teachers and others working in K‐12 education.
The directory seems to be a type of personal bookmark page for the author. Therefore there is not much balance to the selection of links included. For example, there are two links to sites about dogs, but none for cats, which suits me fine; but cat lovers will be disappointed. The directory could use some paring down on the very general resources categories listed at the beginning of the page. The “News” category could be cut in half or more, and the “Reference”, “Web Guides”, and “Librarians” categories could be deleted and the sites re‐assigned to other categories. It could also use some more general sites instead of the specific sites that are included in some categories. Two examples from the music category illustrate this best: Bob Marley has two sites listed among the 14 music sites when just a link to Yahoo’s list of artists <http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Artists/> would be more beneficial; and a link to the Ultimate Band List for the letter T is included when a link to the entire parent list would be better.
While the author has definitely spent a lot of time on the Internet and looking specifically for sites as K‐12 resources, the web site will best serve most K‐12 educators as a starting point for designing their own directory or bookmark file. A more developed and useful K‐12 web site might be the “Teacher’s Tool Box” <http://trc.org/toolbox.htm>, which has more standard categories and better organization. WebEd K12 Curriculum links is recommended for K‐12 students and teachers as a general directory resource.
