Consciousness-raising trek This month, five adult volunteers will set out on a two-year, round-the-world trek that combines a live Internet-based interactive expedition with a service agenda. The Odyssey's goal: to help students become more aware of social issues worldwide. The initial leg of the journey, which runs through May, will take the trekkers to Latin America, where they will explore Mayan and Incan civilizations, traditional life in Guatemala and Peru, and modern challenges faced by these two countries. Along the way, the team members will post updates -- incorporating text, images, video, and audio -- as they live and work with local grassroots organizations, touching on global themes such as wealth and poverty, the environment and development, youth and society, and social change. Best of all, because the program is nonprofit, volunteer-based, and supported by corporate donations, you may use it in your classrooms at no cost. Future think What is the appropriate role of technology in the school of the future? In an ongoing two-year guided discussion, The Millennium Project aims to stimulate some serious thinking about this weighty question. To help keep the discussion focused and on track, a team of experts -- such as Chris Dede, Louis Gomez, Lewis Perelman, and Saul Rockman -- are on hand to guide the proceedings and offer their unique perspectives. Every three months, the discussion focuses on a new set of issues and questions concerning learning technologies and their use in and out of the classroom.

Guided voyage It's easy to get lost in uncharted waters. But when a famous explorer is your guide, you can rest easy. The MCI MarcoPolo site steers teachers to several top-notch education sites on the web, and then ties them all together with a teacher training kit designed to help integrate the online resources into the curriculum. MarcoPolo links to sites produced by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of the Great City Schools, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Council on Economic Education, and the National Geographic Society. This is a voyage you won't get lost on. Student scribes Getting high school students interested in journalism is a great way to encourage them to develop writing, information-gathering, and critical-thinking skills. But not every high school has the resources to manage its very own print or online newspaper. Highwired.Net changes all that, with a free service designed to help high school students publish their own online newspapers. Based on easy-to-use online templates that give the student newspaper sites a professional look, Highwired.Net keeps the focus on writing, not HTML. Using password-protected staging areas, your school's journalism adviser can review student-submitted articles and -- with a single click -- approve the articles and publish them on the web. The Pulitzer is waiting.

Dollars and math sense

Is money more fun than math? Not when you use one to teach about the other. Which is exactly what Moneyopolis does, using interactive units developed in accordance with national standards to teach sixth- through eighth-grade math skills. In the Moneyopolis game, kids practice math skills in the context of personal financial planning. In the process, they learn that math has a real application to their lives, such as figuring out how to save for college -- or their next videogame.