BritannicaSchool Web Site Goes Live

September 26, 2001

Across the county this month, children are going back to school, and headed into classrooms with them is BritannicaSchool (www.britannicaschool.com), the curriculum, reference and creativity site for the K-12 education community. BritannicaSchool, a division of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., announced today that the BritannicaSchool Web site is live and ready to serve teachers and students.

First unveiled at last June’s National Educational Computing Conference in Chicago, BritannicaSchool offers teachers a full suite of curriculum, reference, and productivity tools designed to improve teaching and learning and make the classroom experience more rewarding for teachers and students. The site provides high-quality curriculum materials for developing classroom lessons in science, language arts, mathematics and social studies. It also features Britannica’s vast reference resources, including the full Encyclopaedia Britannica and encyclopedias for younger students, along with tools for creating interactive projects, lesson plans, games, quizzes, and presentations. Its intuitive, flexible format makes it easy for teachers to “hit the ground running” and weave the BritannicaSchool Web site into the day- to-day classroom routine.

“Britannica has been serving educators for more than 50 years, so we put the teaching and learning process, not technology, at the center of our efforts,” said Ilan Yeshua, chief executive officer of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. “Our aim is to help teachers teach the way they know how, not to reinvent teaching; and to provide a product that delivers a real education benefit in today’s classroom.”

Core features of the BritannicaSchool Web site include:

Teacher Tools

  • Assignments – BritannicaSchool provides custom-designed assignments to help teachers interact more effectively with their students. The assignment includes assessment and collaboration tools and additional features that help make the exercises more engaging.

  • Study Groups – BritannicaSchool uses study groups to help teachers assign and track student work.

  • Lesson Plans – The BritannicaSchool Lesson Plan Database aggregates, indexes, and reviews thousands of the highest quality lesson plan materials available on the Web. Each lesson plan is hand-selected by a team of educators, academics, education editors, and current and former teachers.

Learning Materials

A vast array of instructional materials helps teachers enhance lessons,

including:

  • Interactive Study Guides, correlated to state standards through the use

    of the Achieve+McRel Standards Database.

  • Age-appropriate Web sites selected by BritannicaSchool editors.

  • Interactive lessons, labs and simulations.

Reference Desk

  • BritannicaSchool Encyclopedias, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  • BritannicaSchool Internet Guide.

  • Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus.

  • Journals and magazines.

  • Weekly Themes.

Digital Portfolio

Digital Portfolio includes several tools for managing research and other work in progress, including online disk space, an online notepad, and an online bookmark manager. Home access is provided: the Digital Portfolio enables both teachers and students to access their files from any computer connected to the Internet, in class or at home.

  • Creativity Tools

  • Online Project Creator

  • Online Game Templates

The BritannicaSchool Web site is available to schools by subscription, and a variety of subscription packages are available. Information on BritannicaSchool products and services can be found online at www.britannicaschool.com. Interested customers may also call 1-800-621-3900, ext. 7059 for information or to sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Journalists interested in access to the BritannicaSchool Web site for review purposes may get login names and passwords by e-mailing Richard Flower at