This is an excellent search engine site to search all things United States government. A person can search all the government websites, forms and images. Especially relevent to our course is the ability to search for images that do not have copyright restrictions for education.

I'd recommend this site because of the numerous credible links to other sites, the informative essays and pictures and the current event articles found on it. This site provides comprehensive data for the non-geologist , the geology student, and even has maps and tools professional geologists can use. It has an online geology dictionary and a link, "Teaching Earth Sciences" that provides help and guidance for the teacher. I decided to pretend I was teaching students about volcanoes and do a search. Immediately, in newspaper format links to reputable websites on volcaones (i.e. NOVA, USGS, NASA) came up. I clicked on one and found a textbook like format with lots of diagrams, pictures, easy to identify definitions. These links were also helpfully annotated. There was also a column of links concerning volcanoes in the news, and another column of science teacher association links. Across the top of the webpage were links to Home, Store, etc. that made it easy to navigate the site, and below that was another row of links to navigate the "Teacher Earth Sciences" part of the geology.com website.

This is a very informative, comprehensive website that is navigable that I expect to refer to as an earth science teacher. There, are however not very many informative icons or visual aids to break up the plethora of data and links provided. However the links on the home page are separated into intuitive categories and have brief annotations. The websidte defines common geologic terms and addresses current geologic events and categories. There zare numerous articles or brief descriptions of various geological phenomena. Periodically one finds key, informative images (usually after following a link chain), but the site itself is not aesthetically appealing. Once you click on a link, there's no link to take one back home. However, there are many, many links to other USGS or NPS site with helpful information and activities for K-12 kids.

This website is fairly aesthethically appealing and follows an intuitive link path. Provided are numerous lesson plans and activities for the earth science and astronomy teacher. Since NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are primary sources for data and pictures, this is a definitely a good sit e to use as an educator. I followed a link path for Early Solar System education activies and was provided with about 15 links separated into four categories (meteoriets, asteroids, comets, formation of our solar system). I clicked on "Build your Own Comet" and was directed to a lesson plan with a comet recipe and directions for a teacher to do a classroom demonstration. The top and bottom and author and email information. Other lesson plans had the students more involved and only had NASA and a year as author of the plan. This website is informative, helpful and a potential resource to use when I become a teacher.