Pounds 49.95 complete pack, Pounds 15 video only.

THE NORTH SEA: A Focus for School European Partnerships.

Pounds 25.

Curriculum development unit, The University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX.

Imagine yourself on the windswept east coast of Britain - the smell of sea spray and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. A resource pack such as Coastal Erosion, incorporating multimedia experiences, will transport you there.

Coastal Erosion provides flexible routes through a series of learning activities. The range of media is excellent and there are many activities suitable for secondary schools. It consists of a multimedia CD-Rom, a video, information and tasksheets, some glossary, fieldwork and display materials, newspaper articles and support for ICT.

The eight CD-Rom modules deal with coastal processes and erosion, and coastal protection, and include three case studies. Each unit includes video and audio, text, data and graphics, connected by a series of menus and hypertext-style links. This makes it easy to use, inform-ative and useful for providing information and encouraging exploration. The interactive activities on the disc are well supported by worksheets. The biggest disappointment is the World Wide Web link, which isn’t worth the on-line time.

The North Sea: a focus for school European partnerships, produced with EU funding, uses the environment of the North Sea as a common theme for curriculum work. Not only does it provide an information source about the North Sea in three languages (English, German and Dutch), it also gives teachers information on how this project was completed and how they can set up their own European school partnerships with ecus or euros from Brussels. The pack includes text-based factsheets for secondary schools, teacher’s notes and a few activity sheets that may provide the framework for some useful classroom activities.

Karl Donert is senior lecturer in geography and environmental studies and international co-ordinator at Liverpool Hope University College