AP Subjects: Information from AP Central and the College Board You must register (for free) if you want to take advantage of all of the features of this site.
Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature: From the University of Virginia. Includes Catalan and Spanish literatures.
Finding News Information: From the librarians here at Lawrence. Includes links to many newspapers on the Web, and to electronic news source subscriptions.
The Hispanic Reading Room: from the Hispanic Division at the Library of Congress. Provides information and resources covering "the Caribbean, Latin America, and Iberia; the indigenous cultures of those areas; and peoples throughout the world historically influenced by Luso-Hispanic heritage, including Latinos in the U.S., and peoples of Portuguese or Spanish heritage in Africa, Asia, and Oceania."
iLoveLanguages.com: Created and maintainted by Tyler Chambers, this site's purpose is to "list, categorize, and promote Internet resources related to language learning, education, and use." iLoveLanguages also acts as the Languages catalog of the WWW Virtual Library.
Internet Resources for Spanish: More from the librarians here at Lawrence. Includes links to some useful sites on Spanish language, literature, and culture.
MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The section on Spanish includes over 220 listings of sites, exercises, assignments, and other pedagogically useful things.
Newslink: Connections to more than 3,300 U.S. newspapers and 2,000 non-U.S. papers. Also includes links to magazines, radio, and television sites.
Voice of the Shuttle: Spanish & Portuguese (including Latin American, Mexican). Voice of the Shuttle is one of the major Web directories in the humanities.
YourDictionary.com: a large collection of language dictionaries.
There are some excellent sources out on the Web; there are also some that are of varying quality. Even though Web resources are free, I'd suggest being as careful in selecting Web sites as you would be about choosing resources you would buy.
When I search the Web for course-related resources, my first stop is usually one of the sources listed by the Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher from the Library and Information Technology Association. You might want to try looking at sources that select the best of the Web, like these:
It's important to think carefully about any information you find in any format, and to evaluate resources for their accuracy, applicability, and so forth. Evaluation of web resources is especially important. You may want to consult this guide to Evaluating Internet Resources, or this bibliography on Evaluation of Information Sources. You can often learn a lot about a page (and a site) by parsing the URL.
Sites of interest to participants in the 2002 and 2004 AP Spanish Summer Institute at Lawrence.
Canter.net: Using the Internet to Enhance Teaching and Learning.
EDSITEment Foreign Language sites and plans
Grammar practice sites:
MarcoPolo: Internet Content for the Classroom
To locate current web sites from Spanish-speaking countries, you will need to know two things:
Now that you have the name of a country, you can look up the country code. The reason you need this code, by the way, is so that when you search the web following the instructions below, you can limit your searching sites from the country in which you are interested. The country code is part of the URL--the Uniform Resource Locator--which is a code assigned to each and every Internet resource.
You can look up more country codes on the following two web sites:
Now that you have the country code for the area you are researching, you can search the internet. What you will do is combine search terms with the country codes. Different search engines do this in different ways; these are only a few.
For example, let's say I'm interested in finding sites on university students from Mexico. I know that the country code for Mexico is mx from consulting the Domain Categories site above. I would type
If you select Alta Vista Advanced Search you will not need to use the plus sign, can use boolean logic, and can limit by language and date. You will still need to include the two-letter domain code to find sites from a specific country.
Google is a very fast and easy to use search tool. When you go to the Google Advanced Search page you will be given a form that allows you several search options. Type in the words or phrases you want to look for, then include the two-letter country code in the Domains search. Then click on the Google Search button on the top of the page. Again, keep Spanish spellings, vocabulary, and false cognates in mind when entering search terms.
Google also has a very nice Language Tools page, which allows you to search for pages in specific languages no matter what the country might be. The Language Tools page also has a basic translator, an option to reset the default language, and Googles in other countries.
The Yahoo! Advanced Web Search lets you search for words or phrases limited by site and domain. I prefer the Yahoo! Advanced Web Search to the simple Yahoo! search to locate material by country of origin.
To search the simple version of Yahoo!, you can use the plus sign as you do for Alta Vista
Simple Search. To limit your search to a specific country, include the
phrase inurl:[country code] with your search terms. The inurl:
[inurl followed by a colon] limits your search results to sites that
have the country code you specify in the URL. For example, I would type
Versions of Yahoo! for Argentina, Mexico, and Spain are available, as well as a version of U.S. Yahoo! in Spanish with links to more countries. All contain extremely helpful links to many web-based resources including newspapers and current magazines under the link for News and Media. Links for Government and Society and Culture are also interesting. Be sure to check the list of countries included on the Yahoo! Regional: Countries page for links to even more Spanish-speaking countries.
You can use some of the same techniques listed above to find more teaching sites. To find pages hosted at Wisconsin schools, use the following in a domain or url search:
k12.wi.usUse this as you would any of the two-letter country codes in an AltaVista, Google, or Yahoo! search.
AltaVista, Google, or Yahoo! will also let you search for phrases by using quotation marks. For example, try a search in Google for
"advanced placement" spanishand see what you find.
Citing Electronic Documents: This page provides guidance on citing electronic documents and links to other guides, some on specific styles of documentation.
Evaluating Internet Resources: Critical points to consider in evaluating information from the Web.