BY CHARLES BREWER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Back-to-school days are over; the kids are finally settling into the school routine. That means homework. And kids looking for help with homework. If you have an Internet connection on your home PC, your young scholars can find lots of sites purporting to offer help with homework. I say "purporting" because helping with homework can be a complex business.
Just ask any parent.
There are several ways to approach this homework problem.
One is to find others online who can answer specific questions, such as "what is an isosceles triangle?" or "who was the 20th U.S. president?"
America Online has extensive live help available in its Homework Help area (Keyword: Homework). There are online versions of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus, and Compton's Encyclopedia. The Ask A Teacher section allows you to email questions to teachers, and the five Tutoring areas are chat rooms where students can pose questions to teachers.
Do it yourself
Or you can look it up yourself, at an Internet encyclopedia site such as the vast Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://www.eb.com). The site contains 72,000 articles, 12,000 illustrations and tens of thousands of related Web links selected by Britannica editors. Unlimited use of the Britannica site does require a subscription ($8.50 a month or $85 a year), although seven-day free passes are available.
Another is to use a search engine such as Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), Excite (http://www.excite.com) or Lycos (http://www.lycos.com). Yahoo! excels at categorizing sites by subject, the others do wide-ranging searches.
That can be frustrating if you're looking for specific information, fast.
The Internet search site Ask Jeeves (http://www.aj.com) uses artificial intelligence to attempt to understand and answer a specific question. For example, that question about the 20th president resulted in a link to the White House site's section on U.S. presidents (http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/glimpse/presidents/html/presidents.html), and an unfortunate president from Ohio named Garfield.
There's also a Jeeves site specifically for children (http://www.ajkids.com); the links are filtered by SurfWatch software. Or you can visit sites that offer a little of each approach. Homework Central (http://www.homeworkcentral.com) claims to offer more than 300,000 "student-safe" links to research information in more than 2,000 academic areas.
One area of the site lists teachers and experts willing to answer questions by email (but with no guarantees of how long it takes to get an answer). There are also links to search engines such as Ask Jeeves, and articles for parents on helping children study.
The site offers free Web pages for schools, and email accounts for students and teachers.
Tips for parents
Parents looking to help their children in school can find lots of information at the Family Education Network (http://www.familyeducation.com), which offers articles and links. A couple of other suggestions for parents of cyber-surfing students:
Install safe-surfing software before allowing younger kids to roam the Internet. Porno sites seem to pop up everywhere and searches of subjects such as Nazis or the Holocaust can quickly link children to pages from hate groups.
Aside from offensive sites, there are many sites offering unreliable information. This is a big issue for folks seeking health information online, but can also cause problems for students.
If your kids email or chat with others online, warn them against revealing personal information such as full name, age or address. And tell them that if they encounter someone online who turns the conversation toward inappropriate subjects, to log off immediately.
Send e-mail to Charles Brewer at CBrewer@enquirer.com.
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