www.activehistory.co.uk

To see teaching creativity bubble onto the internet, and regain any lost joy for school, take a trip to Active History. Pick your year and topic, and discover an enjoyable, intensely hands-on learning environment. This site is not a comprehensive archive or storybook ?? for that, you??d best go Googling ?? but it deals with skills such as detecting bias in historical documents. The exercises are witty, irreverent and often brilliant. For instance, you will find a whodunit exercise entitled ??Who killed King Rufus??? and a decision-making game about Charles I called ??Don??t lose your head??. The site also houses a trove of audio and video clips, including a recording of William Gladstone in 1888. You will find ads selling DVDs, and the site is better geared for teachers than it is for pupils, but these are minor quibbles about a labour of love and a genuinely helpful service.

LANGUAGES

http://gut.languageskills.co.uk/

If your child is stuck learning lists of German vocab, or how to unravel ??der, die and das??, a visit to Gut is recommended. With familiar headings such as pets, food and clothes, a pupil starting out with the language should be able to find the topic they are working on. They can then feast on inter- active exercises as they wish. Different strategies work for different pupils, so the site??s range of approaches is really gut: there are writing, matching and crossword exercises, pictures, text and listening tasks. All offer the instant feedback that you do not enjoy in the classroom until books come back from teacher. A new site, Gut covers only years 7-9 (ages 12-14), but it shows that learning at home does not require a flashy ??wow?? factor when variety and good exercises are on offer. It has the added bonus of being free ?? for the time being.

MATHS

www.mathsnetgcse.com

Focused on GCSE mathematics, this site is an excellent attempt to offer a solid set of resources for home practice. It contains hundreds of questions, covering syllabus staples such as numbers, geometry and algebra. The scarcity of ??multiple guess?? questions is refreshing. Instead, there are typical maths problems containing randomly generated figures, with step-by-step guides to solving them. Click to see each step, then try a similar but fresh task. Though the annual cost is ??15 for after-school access (more for schools themselves), this is not unreasonable. The look is reminiscent of the days when the web was not so flash, but at least it works over a dial-up connection. The sister site, www.mathsnet.net ?? an every-trick-in-the-book resource ?? is gloriously untidy, but still free.

MARKING

www.studyzones.com

In any search for academic help at home, Study- zones, with its student-friendly approach, is a strong contender for first port of call. Conceived as a virtual private tutor, the core elements of the site are its ??ask a teacher?? and homework-marking facilities, provided by a team of teachers and examiners. While the site aims to turn around submissions within two days, for an immediate answer, students can trawl past queries in all subjects across the secondary-school age range, and view A-grade essays. Not that they are always so inclined ?? physics students still ask about the ??nichrome wire?? experiment. Fully worked answers are the norm (and expected), but it is good to see suggestions for further research sources, to stimulate pupil initiative.

ARCHIVE

www.bbc.co.uk/sosteacher

If a pupil is stuck on biology coursework, a net search for in- formation about ??insulin?? will return a riot of results. Search instead at SOS Teacher and you draw on a vast archive of replies to pupils?? homework questions, firmly related to the curriculum. Replies largely answer the questions, reflecting a range of teacher types, from Mrs Clear to Mr Whatdoyoumean. But with the ability to post new queries closed ?? you can now only suggest a question to be considered ?? the live evening service at www.homeworkhigh.com, 4Learning??s equivalent, is more current. The questions are messy, reflecting queries posted in lazy moments, but a search for those about the heart yielded 46 pages of results ?? an exercise in finding information.

BROADBAND

www.espresso.co.uk

Previously available only to schools, where it has gained plaudits, Espresso Education now features as part of the cable company NTL??s Broadband Plus service, which costs ??3.99 on top of a monthly broadband subscription. Principally serving the primary-school years, though it has secondary French resources, Espresso earns a good report card by sticking to the curriculum and harnessing relevant video clips to unlock topics rather than provide window-dressing. In a topic on habitats, for example, an exercise puts animals and their homes on screen beside big, chunky-looking activities that invite children to match each animal with its environment. The video content means navigation is not for the impatient, making the current free trial crucial.

REFERENCE

www.homeworkspot.com

Just as children at home need reference books, so computers need a gateway that points them helpfully, and selectively, to the wealth of online resources. This US-based site assembles a range of relevant homework aids, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, online museum exhibits and atlases. Links to news services, which can be searched by subject, are ideal for adding relevant quotes and citations to coursework essays. Also offered are ??Ask an Expert?? links, such as the Kids Connect service at www.vrd.org/locator, where an expert may have a minute to spare. With a tool such as Homework Spot, you can never trust all the links to be helpful, but telling children to find out for themselves is no longer a cruel deed.

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