Doing research—or just expanding your knowledge—can now take place 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Today, HISD enables students to access a wealth of materials at home, in their libraries, or in their classrooms with the click of a mouse. The many online resources the district makes available range from encyclopedias to instructional videos and historic newspapers. Feel free to browse!

• Click on the icons on the right to access the resources from school or home.
• Contact your librarian for a handout containing logins and passwords for home use. 
• Contact Deborah Hall for home access information or training on using these resources.

ABC-CLIO Schools provides resources for research in American History, World Geography, and World History, including articles, primary resources, and maps, all correlated with the curriculum. For online training, click here.

BrainPOP provides various resources supporting many areas of the curriculum. Content is aligned to academic standards and easily searchable with the online Standards Tool . BrainPop educator provides training resources and lesson plans. The products in the subscription are BrainPop, BrainPop Jr. and BrainPop Español. Login is required from school and home. Contact your librarian or Debbie Hall to get the user name and password.

Britannica Online includes three encyclopedias: Britannica Elementary, Compton's, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. In addition to encyclopedias, Britannica also provides Enciclopedia Juvenil, Enciclopedia Universal en Español, Global Reference Center, Annal of American History, World Data Analyst, and Webster's Third International Dictionary, unabridged. For training materials, click here.

EBSCO Host This comprehensive online EBSCO package provides students and educators with access to multiple databases simultaneously though five interfaces: Searchasaurus, Kids Search, Student Research Center, EBSCO Host, and the new Grokker visual search tool.

For online training, click here.

Nettrekker organizes Web sites around the K–12 curricula.

All sites are evaluated for academic integrity and age-appropriateness before they are considered. Users can search by grade level, subject directory, keyword, famous person, etc. Nettrekker categorizes Web sites by type: lesson plans, images, learning exercises, games, pictures, or maps and charts. Special content is provided for English-language learners. Resources are aligned with the state standards. For online training, click here. 

Note: Students with visual impairments or related disabilities may click the "OPEN Read Aloud ” button on the Nettrekker site to have various sections read aloud to them as they browse.

Proquest provides access to four products: E-Curriculum Library, History Study Center, Proquest: Literature, and Historical Newspapers. E-Curriculum Library provides answers from more than 2,000 full-text magazines, newspapers, reference books, and transcripts—plus thousands of pictures, maps, educator-approved Web sites, and  audio/video content. For online training on E-Curriculum Library, click here. Historical Newspapers offers a unique collection of primary source historical documents featuring back issues of the New York Times. For online training on Historical Newspapers, click here.

Teaching Books makes available original, in-studio movies of authors and illustrators, audio excerpts of professional book readings, guides to thousands of titles, and a wealth of multimedia resources on children's and young adult literature. For online training, click here.

Thompson Gale provides access to three products: Literature Resource Center, Student Resource Center Gold and Testing and Education Reference Center. Literature Resource Center provides students with access to traditional literary reference works, critical information on authors and their works, and current journal articles. For online training, click here. Student Reference Center Gold provides biographies, essays, full-text magazines, glossaries, historical overviews, photographs, and audio files to answer research needs. For online training, click here. Testing & Education Reference Center helps users prepare for higher education and the working world by providing access to information on colleges and universities, majors, careers, and testing. It also features interactive online practice tests for preparatory examinations, including entrance exams.

Turnitin provides services for high-school teachers concerned with the academic integrity of student work. The primary focus of this service is to prevent plagiarism. This online service allows teacher to check to see that students are writing their own assignments. To obtain School ID#, password, and usage information, contact Deborah Hall. For online training, click here.

United Streaming is a digital video-based learning resource
from Discovery Education. Educators gain on-demand access to 50,000 content-specific segments from 5,000 full-length educational videos—including more than 1,000 new videos in subject areas such as foreign language, secondary math, science, and language arts. This resource requires a unique login for each user. You may obtain a login kit from your librarian or tech coordinator.

Wilson Web provides professional journals and entire articles on many subjects related to education. For online training, click here.

World Book Web includes the entire World Book print encyclopedia plus, e-books, web sites, magazines, activities, discussion guides, an atlas, dictionary, and two spanish language encyclopedias. It is designed to meet the needs of students from grade school through high school.