The calendar is well into August, the temperature is (finally) falling, the sun is rising later in the morning and setting earlier in the evening . . . do you know what all of this means?

Well, in this state you can probably be forgiven if your mind is now wandering to thoughts of white helmets with red N’s on the sides and Memorial Stadium full of red-clad fans on Saturdays.  But for those of you with school-age children, one thought doubtlessly came first to mind—the beginning of a new school year is here.  If your youngsters are brand-new kindergarteners going off for the first time, or your “youngsters” are college students tackling the new life away from home, or they fall anywhere in between, the beginning of school poses certain challenges for you.  What supplies do they need?  What are they going to wear?  If they’re going to college, what do we need to send with them?  What will they do when that first term paper comes due?

Fortunately, you have a willing partner in your quest to get your children ready for the new year.  The Internet has a great deal of resources that can help you with everything from getting the right kind of pencils to furnishing that new dorm room to finding the crackerjack research information for that term paper.

If you need to restock school supplies, several companies will allow you to buy online.  Office Depot, Staples, OfficeMax, and Quill all have Web sites that allow you to order what you need and have it delivered to you.  You can also go to your favorite search engine and search on “office supplies” to see several other sites offering the same merchandise—so you can price the supplies you need in different places and get what’s best for you.

Several known department store chains also have online presences where you can buy school supplies, such as Wal-Mart, Target, JC Penney, or Kmart.  At many of these sites, you can also find back-to-school clothes, electronic equipment from calculators all the way to laptops, and furnishings for your college student heading off to the dorm.

If your electronic purchases involve a computer in some form, you can also buy direct from several online manufacturers.  Dell, Gateway, and HP all have Web sites that allow you to custom-build your computer, order it online, and have it delivered directly to your door.

And if you don’t want to hop from site to site getting everything that you need?  There is one stop available in cyberspace where you can get all of the above items and more.  Amazon.com has school supplies, electronics, clothes, furnishings . . . and for the starving college student spending a fortune on textbooks, check out the special textbook section where you can buy your textbooks at the start of the school year and sell them back when you no longer need them.

Now comes the fun part.  Once you’re all stocked for school, what to do when that first big term paper comes due?  How are you going to find the information you need?

Once again, the Internet can come to the rescue with several sources to find that hard-to-get information.  If you need to look up information in an encyclopedia, you have several sources available.  Encyclopaedia Britannica, MSN Encarta, Columbia and Grolier all offer online sites with encyclopedias and research capabilities.

You can also use Wikipedia, but a word of caution is in order here.  Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which any Internet user can edit to add new information or change existing information about a topic.  This has both good and bad points.  With a large body of users adding to and changing its information, Wikipedia will always have a large variety of information on many topics (including, quite likely, the subject you are researching).  However, since anyone can post information on any topic, the factuality of the information may be in question (and has been twice in recent articles about famous people that were altered by anonymous users with axes to grind against those people).  So don’t be afraid to use Wikipedia . . . but do check out their overview section first and check any information you find there against other sources for accuracy.

For more specialized research, there are also Web sites available to help.  If you need to know the spelling or definition of a word and don’t have a paper dictionary handy, Merriam-Webster has an online dictionary and thesaurus site that can easily help you find the word you need.  If you’re looking for a famous quotation, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is available online too.  (Interestingly, the originating site for B.F.Q., Bartleby.com, also contains online links to several other reference books, including dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, and even the King James Bible.)

If your immediate future (or that of someone close to you), involves readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, the Internet has a world of information at your fingertips to help you send your loved ones back to school fully equipped to learn what they need to be an educated, contributing member of society.