Resources for travelling on the net

Activities related to travelling are becoming very popular in the English classroom. Sometimes, students work with research projects in which they have to prepare a journey, or with simpler tasks where they have to get information from countries or cities. The Internet is an excellent, quick and up-to-date resource for students to gather all kinds of information related to travelling: maps, currencies, weather, ways to travel, distances between countries and sites, museum visiting hours and prices, sightseeing recommendations, etc. Students can even make "virtual" visits to museums. Teaching students to use these resources has advantages far beyond the class. They can transfer this knowledge when preparing trips for their families and friends. The Web also offers us some sites with activities to be used in the classroom.

Although not specifically aimed at ESL/EFL teaching, the following are web sites with worthwhile information about countries, cities and maps: 

• City Net, (offered by Excite) this is the right place to use if  you want to travel to your favourite countries and visit parks, monuments, universities, and so on. Do you enjoy Antarctica, the Caribbean or the Middle East? It is all in this web site. If you are planning a trip abroad for your students (or your family!!) you will find everything here, from pictures of monuments to information in the target language on art, travelling, and everything else.

 
• Virtual Tourist, The Virtual Tourist is a map-based directory of all the WWW servers in the world, operating in close association with W3C's Master Web Server Directory. The Virtual Tourist II was a map- based guide to local and regional information on the WWW. It is no longer in service, but the full content of VT2, including a new map-based interface, can now be found in City.Net.

 
• Road Maps is a site offered by Lycos with Street Maps of the real world, facilitating thus orientation in an unknown city or in a new neighbourhood, or even locating people by their email address. The site has other services of great use in the English classroom. I advise you to visit the CityGuide service, a directory of cities which can be accessed through a hypermedia world map, and which give complete information of interest about the city and its country, a visitor's guide to the main places of interest, culture and history facts, news, weather reports and the latest entertainment news.

 
• Metro Link, this site is a "Subway navigator" which allows to find routes in subway systems in various cities around the world. The network includes all Underground stations and lines, and some others. Students choose the city they want and follow different tasks. Supposing they have to work with London subway, they can find a route by choosing the starting and destination station, consult the list of stations in case they have forgotten a name, use the map, to orientate themselves, search a route in another city, get further information about the subway navigator and even send a message to the author.

• The Voice of the Shuttle a  powerful hypertext page with a large section with links to sites with countries, cities, travel agencies, and more information related to travelling. 

There are also some ESL/EFL web sites worth visiting as they contain teaching ideas for the English classroom which imply the use of the above related information. See for example Teaching with the Web, a compilation of ideas for using WWW resources as a teaching tool as well as other links to sites that have pedagogical information. Consider carefully City Net and Metro Link ideas, which I find motivating and easy to implement. Visit also the Educational Tours, by Kenji Kitao a compilation of educational tours in different parts of the world.