HELP Links

Internet Educational Resource Guide Makes Learning Fun, Safe and Easy

CLEVELAND - Spending long hours surfing the internet for educational materials for home use or in the classroom is time consuming. Well, now, thanks to Help Links, a newly created educational internet resource directory, linking to the internet to find useful educational materials is fast. It is tantamount to having an educational yellow pages for the internet.  

“After years of being in the classroom, I know how important it is for teachers and parents to have everything at their fingertips,” said Joyce Holloway, a teacher who compiled the directory with more than 850 educational web sites that are categorized by subject from A-Z and from pre-kindergarten to 12^th grade. “Help Links benefits everyone involved in educating children,” Holloway said.  Tutors, librarians, guidance counselors, homeschoolers, teachers, parents and students all will find it useful and easy to use.

In addition to learning links, educators will also find useful references.  For example, there is a reference link that will point educators to each state’s certification requirements for teachers.  For parents, Health Links serves as a vault of information for researching various stages of adolescence. One site, www.parentsoup.com, takes the user to various articles and research material on parenting.

 Help Links, and its complimentary CD-Rom, can be purchased for $24.99 by linking to www.businessdesigns.com. The complimentary CD-Rom is a useful tool for those not “computer savvy.”  After the user inserts the CD, all Holloway’s links are just a click away.

“With Help Links more time can be spent with the students instead of searching for things they can use in lesson plans,” Holloway said. “Help Links provides a roadmap that search engines don’t have.”

 “It is organized very well and it is teacher friendly,” said a fourth grade teacher in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School system.  “As a teacher you are always faced with the dilemma of how you combine teaching standards with the different methods of teaching. With Help Links you can use various web sites as an excellent way of addressing the different types of needs for students.” Most of the sites contained in the Help Links Resource Guide offer lesson plans and related activities to help enhance a student’s online experience

Holloway considers herself a passionate researcher. In fact, she initially began compiling the information as a way to organize the resources she used in the classroom. Later, after she had accumulated so many sites, she decided to put all of them into a resource directory. She wanted to have resources ready and on hand to supplement her lesson plans at a moments notice.

 “I wanted to provide students with creative fun-loving educational experiences,” Holloway said.  “I thrive on watching students learn.  I thrive on helping them be creative. Help Links now makes it possible for me to reach out to more students other than those that I teach.”

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