The first site to head for, in all subjects, is the Education Virtual Library (www.csu.edu.au/education), which has links to all kinds of subjects, as well as to newsgroups which discuss subjects.
The grandmammy of all educational websites is The English Server (http://eserver.org), a wonderful series of links to every resource you could possibly want for English study - encyclopaedias, dictionaries, texts, libraries all over the world (though you need to use Telnet to access the libraries).
Studying one of Shakespeare's plays? Try The Shakespeare Classroom (www.jetlink.net/(tilde)massij/shakes), which links to things like the Shakespearean Insult Service, which offers such useful insults as as "Thou paunchy, motley-minded nuthook". Another link here is Raymond Chandler Does Shakespeare - "I was the last guy left. I heard a gunshot. I looked off into the distance, toward beautiful La Jolla, a solid heavy man like a rock."
In Irish, the best site has to be Sean Mac Suibhne's page (www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/(tilde)smacsuib), which offers links to songs in Irish, classes around the world, email circulation lists for people who want to write to each other in Irish, fonts with fadas, online classes and much, much more. It even has links to Manx and Scots Gaelic sites. If you're using a Mac, you can get things like the game of Hangman in Irish, and an Irish interface for Eudora Lite, for free from Everson Gunn at www.indigo.ie/egt.
Italian learners can follow the links from www.hcrc.bard.edu/italian/ index.htm, which links to literature, newspaper and magazines and even interactive chats in Italian. CIAO (the Cultural Italian-American Organisation) has lots of links to language, sports, food and publications at its site (www.umich.edu/(tilde)newitclu).
If you're learning French, try http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL.
The German Internet Project is at http://www2.uncg.edu/(tilde)lixlpurc/GIP - and this includes KinderWeb, for learning German through play.
Music students can find music resources at www.music.indiana.edu/ music(underline)resources - following the links may lead to better resources. Actually there's a lot of music on the Web, including sites where you can buy CDs, like www.cdnow.com, and thousands of fan pages for bands and composers. The Contemporary Music Centre in Baggot Street has a page for Irish composers at www.cmc.ie.
Everyone's favourite geography link has to be the CIA World Factbook - www.odci.gov/cia/publications/nsolo/ factbook/ei.htm is the section on Ireland - though this resource could destroy illusions about the allknowingness of the CIA: the map of Ireland marks Tullamore, but not Athlone.
Another useful site is the Department of Geography at the University of Texas at Austin (www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/virtdept/ contents.html), which has a good series of links in its "virtual geography department".
For Latin links, use the Georgetown University page; www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/ latin/latin-lib.htm carries classic texts.
Woodwork is quite well covered at www.iucf.indiana.edu/(tilde)brown/ hyplan/wood.html, a specialist page; but the best page for all of the technical subjects is www.phila.k12.pa.us/schools/ northeasthigh/hightech. This page of Northeast High School of Philadelphia includes technical drawing, woodwork and metalwork, or as they call it in America, metal fabrication. The University of Limerick's Metalwork Teachers' Resource (www.ul.ie/(tilde)gordons/lavelles) is also good.
Some art links are at www.fine- art.com/link.html, which has a huge - but very American - list of links to artists, galleries, mailing lists, museums and resources.
For maths, some of the best links are at the World Wide Web Virtual Library's maths site (www.vol.it/MIRROR2/EN/ ftp.math.fsu.edu/DocRoot/), an immense site with every resource a numerate heart could desire.
it's nice to share
One of the most revolutionary things the Internet offers is shareware. This is software written by people who put it on the Net free for downloading. You download it to your computer, install it and use it for a while, and if you like it, you pay for it. This depends on your honesty, but it's very, very bad form not to pay for your shareware. You find shareware at www.shareware.com, as well as many other places around the Web.
Make sure you have a good virus scanner - and some of these are shareware too - and scan anything you're thinking of installing, so you won't bring a virus into your computer. McAfee is shareware, and you can download new versions of it regularly to nuke the new viruses continually being written by sad individuals.
There's only one more thing to know about the computer, to make it the perfect tool to expand your life. Somewhere on it you will find an "off" switch - on a modern PC this is accessed by going to Start and then to Shut Down, and on all Macs, you go to the Apple icon and Shut Down.
This is a valuable switch, which should be used whenever you find that normal people can't understand what you are saying any more. Near to it you will find a door, a coat, perhaps a lead with a dog on the end of it, plus, if you're lucky, a football. Use as directed.
Lucille Redmond can be contacted at lucred@indigo.ie.
