Database of the Month: ERIC

ERIC - the Education Resources Information Center - is an online digital library of education research and information that contains more than 1.3 million records and links to more than 323,000 full-text documents dating back to 1966 . ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

In addition to this ERIC has launched the SearchEduResources YouTube channel. The channel is designed to provide instructional tutorials and other short videos to ERIC's broad base of users. A selection of 19 tutorials is now available to provide guidance on ERIC's suite of online features and tools. Visitors can receive alerts when new videos are added by subscribing to the channel.Over the past year, ERIC has established a presence in social media and implemented an expanded selection of collaboration tools. These include a Twitter feed, Facebook page, RSS feeds, and a "Share" tool that enables searchers to post citations and searches to social applications and sites.

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence

The U. S. Department of Education maintains the FREE (Federal Resources for Educational Excellence) website, which provides links to K-12 teaching and learning resources from federal agencies. This is one stop shopping for the teacher who is looking for reliable web resources and free educational materials in the subjects of Arts & Music, Health & Physical Education, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, World Studies, and U.S. History. Let’s look at a small sample of interesting resources:

• The National Institutes of Health, Office of Science Education - The OSE is the coordinator and sponsor of science education projects at the NIH. These programs are developed for elementary, secondary, and college-level students and teachers. The website organizes educational resources by topics, grade levels, and resources formats.

• The National Archives, Teachers Resources - The National Archives has a section devoted to providing teachers with lesson plans for using primary documents in the classroom. For example, one lesson is entitled: Powers of Persuasion - Poster Art of World War II. This lesson includes links to the National Archives’ online gallery of the war posters, standards correlations, teaching activities, and a poster analysis worksheet.

• The Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook - The World Factbook contains “information on the history, people, government, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.” There are also flags and maps - physical maps, political maps, regional maps, and a time zone map. One can also view a country comparison of a variety of economic data, demographics, geography, etc. On the lighter side, there is an entertaining, yet educational Kids Page that offers games, puzzles, and information about the CIA.