Need good high school biology resources!

[jimmiller12]

Being a Biology student, I often find it difficult to find appropriate reading/learning material. Sifting through multitude of boring textbooks to find up-to-date content is often extremely time consuming. Is there an easier way to clarify complex biology concepts without wasting so much time?

[jonmoulton]

Wikipedia is a good resource. It contains errors, but most of the science pages are useful. Likely you can't cite it as a resource in your papers, but for a quick introduction to the meaning of a term and the term's connections with other topics I find Wikipedia very useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

PubMed is some tougher reading, but is an entry into the primary research literature. PubMed shows abstracts of papers on medicine-related topics (though a broad swath of biology is considered to fit that definition). For most high school level students it can be rough going, but you write well so I'd guess that it is worth some of your time to search terms and look at their occurrence in papers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

PubMed Central has full text of some papers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

Now for some magazines/journals.
Easy: Scientific American
Harder: American Scientist
Tough: Nature, Science

Textbooks are ALWAYS out of date, at least by a few years. However, it is in texts that folks are trying to teach a topic, laying out its foundations (sometimes a review article in a journal will do the same for a narrow topic). If you can get ahold of some recent introductory college-level texts, they are good sources but they are also generally fairly expensive. Look at the used text market, or befriend someone in their 3rd or 4th year of university study and borrow their lower-division texts.

Happy hunting!