Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE)

FREE is an online database from the U.S. Department of Education that features more than 1,500 federally supported teaching resources. It provides, in one place, links to all the online educational materials of various U.S. government agencies, much like ResourcesZine with planning-related resources.

FREE reminds us that there are so many resources available from the federal government that we can utilize to improve aspects of our communities. There is something for everyone here. Educators will find it very useful for finding lesson plans or supplementing lessons with additional materials.

You can search by subject or by agency. FREE has a new resources section and is now offering RSS feeds as well. The site is remakably user friendly for the large amount of information it contains.

Some topics on FREE relevant to planning and cities:

Land Use History of North America (U.S. Geological Survey)
http://biology.usgs.gov/luhna/

Nationalatlas.gov (Department of the Interior)

Zoom Into Maps (Library of Congress)
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/maps/introduction.html

Historic Maps in K-12 Classrooms (Newberry Library, National Endowment for the Humanities)
http://www3.newberry.org/k12maps/

Map Collections: 1544-1996 (Library of Congress)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html

Water Resources of the United States (U.S. Geological Survey)
http://water.usgs.gov/

...and a lot more. The above examples are taken from just one small section.