It is 3 p.m., and in an onlinenewsroom here, Leah Clapman, an editor, makes a conference call to discuss the day's news developments from Iraq with
three former high school teachers.

Lisa Greeves, until recently a teacher in Fairfax County,
says the story of the looting of thousands of artifacts
from Iraq's National Museum has great potential for
generating classroom discussion. Lara Maupin, another
former teacher, is also enthusiastic. The museum story, she
says, ties in neatly with standardized world history
lessons on Mesopotamia as a cradle of civilization.

Soon, Ms. Clapman has assigned the day's task: Kristina
Nwazota, a journalist, will write 750 words summarizing the
looting story for a student audience with hypertext links
to photographs and background information on Mideast
history. And, Ms. Greeves, who works from her suburban
Virginia home, will write a lesson plan intended to
generate classroom discussion of the issues facing the
United States military forces as making war gives way to
the task of creating and keeping peace.

The journalists and former teachers who produce the
NewsHour Extra Web site (www.pbs.org/newshour.extra/),
which is associated with PBS's "The NewsHour With Jim
Lehrer," are among the most conspicuous practitioners of a
new hybrid online genre - part daily journalism, part
education - that has taken shape during the war. They
produce daily online news stories and lesson plans intended
to help teachers respond intelligently to student demands
for classroom discussion of what is going on in Iraq.

"The kids all want to talk about the war," said Camille N.
Sullivan, who teaches world history to 200 sophomores at
Clear Creek High School in League City, Texas, a Houston
suburb. Responding to student requests for war information
while keeping pace with the history requirements of the
Texas curriculum, Ms. Sullivan said, has been difficult, so
though she previously had rarely drawn educational
materials from the Internet, during the war she has used
several of the NewsHour Extra's lesson plans.

"All the different names and war developments make it hard
to keep up," Ms. Sullivan said. "Who's briefing at Centcom?
What's happened on the battlefield? So this is a good
resource."

Since the mid-1990's, many media and other companies have
rushed to offer classroom materials for students and
teachers.

The Discovery Channel, for instance, created
DiscoverySchool.com (www .discoveryschool.com) and The New
York Times began drawing on its newspaper stories and other
resources for its Learning Network (www.nytimes.com
/learning/).

CNN, in partnership with Harcourt, offered CNN Student News
(www.cnnfyi .com) and Weekly Reader, the newspaper for
elementary students founded in 1928, developed a Web site
(www .weeklyreader.com).

Most of these and dozens of other sites have offered
student-oriented news and information about the Iraq war.

NewsHour Extra has been producing online classroom
materials since 1998. But only last month, when the United
States began its attack on Iraq, did Ms. Clapman's staff
began offering daily lesson plans, focusing on everything
from the motivations of suicide bombers to the ethical
question of having journalists embedded with military
forces.

How many of the nation's teachers are using the online
lesson plans remains unclear, though NewsHour Extra said it
watched the number of visits to its Web site increase from
57,000 the week before the war started to 128,000 during
the war's second week.

Among the visitors was Lawrence E. Fontaine, who teaches
social studies to students in grades 7 through 12 at the
Hope-Page School in Hope, N.D., 70 miles northwest of
Fargo. The school has just 200 students, he said, but has
two computer labs, which Mr. Fontaine said he encouraged
his students to use.

"I like to get my kids to be computer savvy," he said.

On March 17, when President Bush addressed the nation to
announce his war plans, Mr. Fontaine taped the speech and
played it back later in class.

Since that time Mr. Fontaine said he has frequently
discussed the war with his students, several of whom have
relatives participating in it.

On March 28, he said he used NewsHour Extra's lesson plan
on embedded journalists, which asked students to weigh the
access given to embedded journalists against the shuttered
perspective that can result when all information originates
within an American military unit.

Ms. Greeves, who taught journalism to high school students
in the Fairfax County district until she went on maternity
leave in 2000, wrote that lesson plan.

On Monday, after Ms. Clapman's conference call, Ms. Greeves
spent the early evening in her sunroom, alternately tending
her 10-week-old baby, and writing War Choices, which was
posted today.

It suggested that teachers ask high school students to
analyze whether American soldiers should, in the case of
widespread looting in Iraq, protect hospitals, museums,
embassies, schools, government offices or water supplies.