More Homework Help: Skoool.ph

Intel and the Department of Education have launched www.skoool.ph, a site that provides interactive math and science lessons for students and teachers.

You can browse it according to year level or subject. It requires that you have Javascript installed, which shouldn't be a problem if you watch Youtube on that computer anyway.

HOWEVER, some feedback for the people behind skoool.ph, based on my "surface scan" of the site:

1. Please get rid of the "concept paper" language! And with bad grammar too. For example:

The learner shall developed the following competencies:

The site is online now; talk to your audience directly, instead of referring to them in the third person. Right now it looks like a site targeted to your donor rather than the Pinoy student. And do a grammar check!!!

2. The math lesson I tried out was too UK-centric. Is there an effort to localize this? Not to dumb down the content, but only because it's not generally in a Pinoy high school student's experience to pay "2.50" for a sandwich and eat "bonbons."

Spell it, say it, define it, use it in a sentence

Some people know how every English word is pronounced or spelled. (Or claim to know, at least.) I don't. And for those words I always have trouble with, I usually go to Answers.com.

An Answers.com entry about a word contains more than its definition. Just today I looked up how "tiara" is pronounced, and now I know that, as well as its Latin and Greek source words, its translations in a dozen languages, and even how a tiara made.

Now, I could go to a regular online dictionary for what I needed, but I think I learn more when I read all those extra bits.

There are how many Philippine regions again?

My old "Araling Panlipunan" book would probably say 12 regions, plus the National Capital Region. Your book should be more recent, but it's good to check online anyway.

• The National Statistical Coordination Board website says we have 17 regions, as of September 2007. (That "as of" is important!)
• The DMOZ Open Directory says 17 as well, and includes short descriptions of each region.
• The Regions of the Philippines Wikipedia entry says 17 too, and includes a history of the regional divisions, as well as links to the entries of each province.

I noticed that these sites of the three, only Wikipedia classified Palawan as belonging to Region 6. (It was transferred from Region 4B.) Which reminds me why it's good to check more than one source.

Wikipedia

Despite the controversy about letting students use Wikipedia for research, I still think it's too useful to ignore.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. This both a good and bad thing -- good because you get to read the shared knowledge of the world, and bad because people can post misleading or untrue information. The active Wikipedia community has rules to protect the integrity of their project, but all the same, you have to be careful and check with other sources if your Wikipedia info is correct.

Which is what you're supposed to be doing anyway. Even if your source is an old-school, heavy encyclopedia volume, it's still not enough -- you should not be using that as your only source of info. Encyclopedia entries are short summaries and may contain outdated information. Good thing the Internet is around so getting more sources is easier.

Wikipedia works best when you use it only as a guide to get more information. Check the "References" on the bottom of the page, and you'll see other websites that are probably better resources for your topic.

scholar.google.com

Google Scholar is a search engine for academic papers and documents, or "scholarly literature", as they put it. You can find many references for your "review of related literature" here, although many sites provide only abstracts and not the full text of documents. If you hit a dead end with an article that you can't read for free, search for related work of the authors -- maybe you'll find other sites that have more information.

This is also very helpful when your topic is something that is too current ("blogging habits of high school students", "social networks" etc) for your school library to have gotten good resources on it already.

www.gutenberg.net

Project Gutenberg is a site that collects books that are in the public domain, publishing them in various electronic formats.

The ebooks here are free to download, and you can read them on your PC or other gadgets that can read text files. Project Gutenberg has also managed to collect works in Tagalog, Cebuano, and Iloko.

If you can't decide which one of the millions of free ebooks to start with, you can try:

• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
• Lineage, Life and Labors of José Rizal, Philippine Patriot
• Homer's The Iliad
• Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome