With a national drop in charitable contributions making it harder for schools to raise their needed funds, thousands of PTAs, schools, and nonprofit organizations across the country are taking advantage of two innovative fundraising tools: GoodShop.com and GoodSearch.com.

To help students with online research, the Boston-based company WebNotes has created a web-based highlighting and "sticky note" tool that allows users to compile information from multiple web pages to organize and share their findings. "Users can capture information that's important and share it with other people," said co-founder Ryan Damico.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service has unveiled a new online educational game called "WaterLife: Where Rivers Meet the Sea." Developed through a partnership with Montgomery College's Computer Gaming and Simulation program in cooperation with NOAA's National Estuarine Research Reserve System, the web-based game provides science instruction for students in grades 4-7 through a series of challenges and animations.

"E-Books Directory" is an online resource that contains links to freely downloadable eBooks, technical papers, and documents, as well as user-contributed content, articles, reviews, and comments. Launched in 2008 as a free service to students, educators, researchers, and eBook lovers, the directory is a database-driven web site that uses PHP scripting language and the MySQL relational database.

Social-networking site Classroom 2.0 has teamed up with PBS Teachers and Elluminate Inc. to provide a series of free monthly webinars designed to help K-12 educators learn new ways to integrate online instructional resources into their classrooms and engage students.

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies is offering a series of free online tours that invite educators, families, and students to learn about America’s diverse cultural heritage by examining objects drawn from the Smithsonian’s vast collections. The cultural heritage tours "allow viewers to delve deeper and learn even more about African American and Latino history and culture through the prism of art and historical objects," said Director of Programs Stevie Engelke.

Educators and students now can give presentations using the power of cloud computing, while possibly saving thousands of dollars compared to other online presentation services. Slidelive is an alternative to services such as WebEx, a popular (but pricey) online meeting and video conferencing service.

National libraries from more than a dozen countries, in coordination with the United Nations' education agency, put some of humanity's earliest written works online April 21 with their launch of the World Digital Library, a web site in seven languages -- English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian -- that leads readers through a trove of rare finds.

What happens to the waste we all produce? When does it make sense to recycle? Can trash become energy? Teachers and their students can find answers to these questions and more at Think Green, a new K-12 resource from Waste Management, powered by Discovery Education