Britannica Online - High School Edition is an excellent resource for high school students. It offers good basic information on a variety of subjects. This is where I recommend students start their research on most topics to gain good overall knowledge.

Our World Cultures classes are currently researching Latin American countires. Their challenge is to analyse a country's social and natural environment to learn how it effects the country's culture.

I chose Costa Rica as a country to explore and see what information Britannica Online offered. The information was extensive and provided many leads that could be followed up in other resources. Thirty-nine pages of information were indexed with active links on the left side of the article. Students could read the information from top to bottom or skip around and read the articles that fit their topic best. Britannica supports students with limited vocabularies by linking key words to their definition. To support different learning styles, students can print the page or article, save it to their workspace or email it to themselves. Britannica also gives them the article's citation in MLA, APA or other styles.

In addition to Britannica's article, there were links to "The Web's Best Sites" in a box on the upper right. Those included links to: Costa Rica National Parks, World Health Organization, BBC News - Costa Rica, Lonely Planet, and National Geographic Travel and Culture. These are all great resources. There is also a link in this box to "Journals and Magazines" provided by EBSCO.

All in all. This is not only a good place for students to start their research, but also a source of other useful resources to get more information.

I also explored the World Atlas link from the Britannica Homepage. Here you can look up a country and get a map, a summary, a profile (which is a table of key information), points of interest, and a short article on the country that links to the extensive article I discussed above. One nice feature is the map, which allows you to zoom in and move around. You can click on different parts of the map and have articles on that area pop up.