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FreeRice is a product of the United Nations World Food Program and aims to raise awareness about hunger. By asking visitors simple trivia questions in English vocabulary and grammar, math, geography subjects, human anatomy and more, the site has raised enough funds to provide meals to over 10 million people. The site is nothing spectacular in terms of design, but given that it is first and foremost a charitable site, this shortcoming is certainly forgivable.

ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education (AEJEE) is a downloadable, lightweight GIS tool for exploring geographic data. AEJEE can save and open projects, so work can be shared between users, or between school and home. AEJEE can classify and symbolize shapefiles, integrate a wide array of image data, project on-the-fly shapefiles stored in decimal degree, and use data distributed over the Internet from ArcIMS services from the Geography Network, or other hosted ArcIMS sites.

The short version is simple. Google Lit Trips are free downloadable files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth. At each location along the journey there are placemarks with pop-up windows containing a variety of resources including relevant media, thought provoking discussion starters, and links to supplementary information about "real world" references made in that particular portion of the story.

"Welcome to the David Rumsey Map Collection Database and Blog. The Map Database has many viewers and the Blog has numerous categories. The historical map collection has over 37,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented."

Crowdsourcing is key to making history accessible, approachable

U.S. topographic map site.

"The mission of the Library of Congress is to make its resources available and useful to Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The goal of the Library's National Digital Library Program is to offer broad public access to a wide range of historical and cultural documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning. The Library of Congress presents these documents as part of the record of the past. These primary historical documents reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views expressed in these collections, which may contain materials offensive to some readers."

Global issues and world portraits

For media folks like me, the cool, interactive graphical program that is Google Earth has always had a Holy Grail-inserting moving media so it plays right over the terrain, as still images will do. We've gotten a lot closer with two new features, one with mixed blessings. First, Google Earth now has a YouTube layer.