Skills and strategies students need to be successful today and in the future are effectively taught through engagement in science. When competently applied, the Internet is an instructional tool that can enhance hands-on learning in new and powerful ways. The best online inquiry-based projects are collaborative, student-driven and technology dependent. Students who are responsible for their own learning become apprentice scientists asking and studying authentic research questions. Teachers serve as facilitators, guiding student learning. Effective Internet projects provide the following key elements: Guidance - Students plan and conduct an investigation from Webpages that guide them through all the steps of effective inquiry-based learning. The Webpages provide teachers with opportunities to customize the investigation to meet the needs of their students. Example Information - Students build knowledge from online materials that include up-to-date information, animations, simulations, skill-development activities, etc. Examples: Info - Animation Communication - Students contact scientists and other experts. They communicate with and, where appropriate, COLLABORATE with other student researchers. Example Data - Students access data in real time or on demand. Where appropriate, they contribute data to ongoing studies. Examples: Data Entry - Experimental Data (Be sure to click on "play with the data.") Check out SIMply Prairie, a midlevel prairie project developed at Fermilab Student Homepage - (Teacher Pages). This approach for using the Internet in instruction is based on material from Plugging In which introduces what we know about effective learning and effective technology and puts it together in a planning framework for educators and policymakers. Fermilab offers LInC Online, a course where K-12 educators create these online projects. Prepared by Marge Bardeen