With the new school year is poised to begin, Yahoo! Tuesday launched a new free resource portal for college, high school and middle school teachers and students.

With Yahoo! Education, a teacher can create a virtual classroom environment and communication center for their students.

The site includes ways for instructors to post class rosters, calendars, and syllabi, and contact students through private classroom message boards and e-mail.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company says new site should make it virtually impossible for students to use the "My dog ate it," excuse for losing a class syllabus or reading materials.

"Yahoo! Education provides an essential service to professors and teachers, who can access this resource as a free and convenient method of extending communication with their students beyond the traditional classroom," says Yahoo! Education senior producer Catherine Davis.

Yahoo! also announced new agreements with three education companies (Bartleby.com, Britannica.com, and Houghton Mifflin Company), who will add their resources to create the Yahoo! Education reference area.

The Reference area comes with access to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; The Britannica Concise; Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition; Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body; The Oxford Shakespeare; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations; and the World Factbook.

Users will also have access to a 14-day free trial to the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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