Handouts for Integrating Internet technology and ...
Handouts for Integrating Internet technology and techniques into classroom instruction
By David Warlick
Raleigh, North Carolina USA
david@landmark-
919-571-3292
Copyright ( 2000 by David Warlick
All Rights Reserved
Please contact David Warlick for permission to reproduce any or all of these materials.
Table of Contents
Preparing Students for a “New Age” 3
Information as Raw Materials 3
Collaboration 4
Finding Collaborators on the Net 4
Collaborative Structures – Project-based Learning (PBL) 6
Tools for Collaborating 10
Rich & Interactive Information Resources 12
Topic Oriented Directories 12
Search Engines 12
The Language of Search Engines 13
Net-Smarts 14
The S.E.A.R.C.H. Process 14
Web Pages Worth Bookmarking 16
Evaluating Internet Resources 17
Harvesting & Processing Web Resources 18
Contributive Expression 20
Instructional Benefits 20
Web Design 21
Preparing Students for a “New Age”
Information as Raw Materials
| |Source of Raw Materials |Raw Materials are Processed |Products are distributed |
|Agrarian Age |Cultivated Fields |Processed largely in the home |Consumed in the home |
|evolved over thousands of years | | | |
|Industrial Age |Quarries & Forests |Processed in factories |Distributed through mercantile |
|Evolved over 2 or 3 hundred years | | |endeavors |
|Information/Knowledge age |Networks |Information processing software |Networks |
|Evolved over 2 or 3 decades | | | |
Because these information processing technologies are not smokestack and heavy steel machines, they are very rapidly infiltrating nearly every aspect of our society…and during the past couple of years this has been especially true in our many of our schools.
This gives us, as educators, a unique opportunity to help students develop skills that will be important to their futures by giving them authentic experiences in the classroom. Virtually the same technologies and information conduits are now being placed in our classrooms that the economy outside the classroom uses…effectively breaking down the walls that have isolated our classrooms for so many decades. Using the model from the previous page we can say that students (and teachers) can spend time:
Collaboration
Advantages for Using People as a Source of Information
1. More interactive -- people can explain things in many different ways. By continuing to ask questions of people, we can turn the information around and see it from many perspectives, appreciating it more fully.
2. More dynamic -- Information that is held and communicated by people responds well to changing information environments. Our brains are highly adaptive and so too is the information that they hold.
3. Historically rich -- When you access information from a person, you can also get the history of the information…its roots and how it has evolved.
4. Audience sensitive -- People will usually attempt to share information on your level, in layman's terms or in technical language, depending on the receiver.
Finding Collaborators on the Net
|Find an Expert Sites |
|Service |URL |
|New Jersey Network | |
|Infrastructure in Education's | |
|Ask an Expert Page | |
|Pitsco's Ask an Expet Page | |
|The Mad Scientist Network | |
|The Franklin Institutes' Ask a| |
|Scientist Page | |
Searching State Governments and Universities
In the USA, all state governments have their own web site. The URLs are always “.” plus the two letter postal abbreviation, plus “.us”. Following this convention, the state government web sites for North Carolina and California would be:
and
For other USA government web sites, go to:
For a list of world governments on the web, go to:
Finding Communities on the Internet
What is an Internet Mailing List?
An Internet mailing list is very similar to the postal variety. It is a list of addresses, e-mail addresses, to which messages can be sent in a bulk-mailing fashion. Internet mailing lists have one very important advantage over postal mailing lists. Anyone, who is on the list, can send messages to the entire list of members. Any member of the list can send announcements, solicit help, report successes and less successful projects, and open discussions.
To join an Internet mailing list, you only need two pieces of information:
1. The name of the list, List Name.
2. The e-mail address of the computer that maintains the list, List Address.
Once you have this information, you simply address an e-mail message to the list address, and type in the subject of the message:
Subscribe
Then send the message. After a moment you will receive an automatic e-mail message from the computer welcoming you to the list and explaining some of the guidelines for participating in the discussions.
Mailing List
Finding Internet Mailing Lists
|Directories of Internet Mailing Lists |
|Directory Name |URL |
| | |
|The Directory of Scholarly | |
|E-Lists | |
|Liszt Directory of Email | |
|Discussion Groups | |
|Publicly Accessible Mailing | |
|lists | |
|Search the List of Lists | |
Tips for Using Mailing Lists
1. Read the e-mail message that is sent to you upon joining a mailing list very carefully. This automated message will include very important information about the purpose of the list and the types of discussions that take place there. Follow these guidelines. This message will also include instructions for removing your e-mail address from the list, should you decide to leave it.
2. Consider that Internet mailing lists are forums and therefore imply a sense of place for their users. You are a guest in this place and should respect its customs and wishes.
3. Most people are eager to help you. There is a genuine concern for education, and using the Internet to send valuable information to classrooms is an obvious benefit that most people appreciate. So, do not hesitate to post questions to a mailing list for your class unless it is explicitly prohibited in the guidelines, which will appear in the introductory message.
4. At the same time that most people are eager to help education, they are also busy. They will not appreciate receiving numerous postings that do not contribute to the list's goals. So as you ask for information from experts via the mailing list, consider that this will be your only chance. Carefully word your question(s) so that you will get the most and best information for your classroom. Get your class to help you pose your questions. Learning to ask GOOD questions is an essential information age skill.
5. Monitor the messages that are posted to the list. Very soon you will be able to identify the specific people who would be most valuable as a support for your class. Send an e-mail request for information directly to these few people. This will prevent you from adding e-mail to a multitude of mailboxes of people who would not be of help and may see your requests as an intrusion.
6. When writing your request for information, make it short. Once again, the people to whom you are sending the message are busy and do not have time to read a lengthy letter. Also keep your paragraphs short (no more than three sentences) with a blank line between. People are more likely to read many short paragraphs than a few long ones.
7. Do not write a lengthy introduction and do attach a signature to your e-mail message. Explain very briefly what your class is doing and rely on the signature to tell the reader who and where you are. If you are soliciting information from a mailing list used by K-12 educators, then promise something in return. If you are developing a new unit on butterflies, then offer to send your teacher friends a copy of the unit. If you are asking teachers to survey their students for information that your class will be compiling and analyzing, then offer to send the results of your survey to all contributing classes.
|Internet Mailing List |
|That have Formed Professional Collaborative Communities |
|Net-Happenings |Send the message "sub NET-HAPPENINGS your name" to |
| |listserv@lists. |
| | |
|Media-L |Send the message "sub MEDIA-L your name" to |
| |listserv@.binghamton.edu |
| |Use of media in the classroom and in education |
|Vocnet |Send the message "sub VOCNET your name" to |
| |listserv%ucbcmsa.bitnet@ |
| | |
|Edpolyan |Send the message "sub EDPOLYAN your name" to |
| |listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu |
| | |Education policy analysis in the U.S. |
|WWWEDU |Send the message "sub WWWEDU your name" to |
| |listproc@ready. |
| | |
|Hilites |Send the message "sub HILITES your name" to |
| |Majordomo@ |
| | |
|K12Admin |Send the message "sub K12ADMIN your name" to |
| |listserv@listserv.syr.edu |
| | |A mailing list for K-12 administrators |
|LM-Net |Send the message "sub LM-NET your name" to |
| |listserv@listserv.syr.edu |
| | |A popular and valuable mailing list for school media specialists |
Finding Other Classes for Collaboration
Perhaps one of the most intriguing techniques for finding classes on the Internet is Web66. Web66 has been around for many years. This website was the first to suggest that schools should have their own websites so that students could showcase their work. They have a wealth of information on building and maintain a school website.
1. From the Web66 home page we click on International Registry of Schools on the Web.
2. The Registry of Schools is a database of schools from around the world who have registered their school website so that other people can find it. There are a number of other registries, but Web66 is the oldest and biggest.
3. A map of the United States appears. We click the word Europe so that we can get the Europe registry page.
4. When the map of Europe appears, we click the outline of Italy and receive a list of elementary and secondary schools with websites.
5. Our science teacher will then view a number of the websites, looking for some that feature students work, an indicator that teachers are involved in the implementation of the site and not a parent or other outside agency. Send our introductory e-mail to the teachers or webmaster of the Italian site.
When searching for Italian schools through Web66, I received a list of 22 elementary and 100 secondary schools.
Collaborative Structures – Project-based Learning (PBL)
Essentially, PBL is when students are acquiring skill and content by engaging in an activity that:
1. Extends beyond the skills and content being learned
2. Have real world application from the students' perspective
3. Involve decision-making on the part of students
Perhaps the best way to understand PBL is through an example. The following describes a project that I conducted over the Internet a couple of years ago. It was called the Eco-Marketing Project.
The Eco-Marketing Project
The primary objective of this project was to help students develop descriptive and persuasive writing skills. Students in about fifteen classes in the U.S., Canada, and Europe were divided into teams of three or four students per team. Each team became a company. Their task was to develop an imaginative new product that they had never seen in a store or shopping catalog, but a product that they thought other kids would buy. The product also had to be constructed of at least 50% recycled materials.
After fully developing the ideas around their product, each team had to collaborate to write a sales pitch, text that not only described their product and what it did, but also convinced the reader that he or she should buy this product. After their sales pitches were completed, they were entered into a website where they became part of an on-line catalog, where other students could come and shop. Each shopper was given 200 make-believe dollars with which they could select and mock purchase the products that they most wanted.
The writers could periodically check their product sales and as a result the success of their writing. If they were not satisfied, they could examine the sales pitches of products that were selling, and then edit their pitch based on what they learned about writing descriptively and persuasively. Upon re-issuing their sales pitch, they could continue to evaluate their writing in terms of orders.
Components of PBL Activities
Developing project ideas for your class can be difficult the first few times. The following list may help by providing a flexible structure of sorts for your ideas. This list includes components that may or may not be present in your project idea. I will also describe how each item was included in the Eco-Marking Project.
1. Explicit connections established instructional standards
The primary curriculum objective of Eco-Marketing was to help students develop writing skills described in the state's curriculum standards. Additional objectives were also identified including skills and content from the science and social studies curriculum as well as mathematics and health.
2. Collaboration either among students in your class, between students and experts, or students in a variety of classes
Students, first of all, were working in teams to develop and sell their imaginative product. In another way, they were collaborating with other students from across the Internet to test the success of their product development and marketing -- collaboration between producers and consumers. An additional feature of this project was the students could ask questions of business students in three business colleges, questions regarding marketing, supply & demand, and other issues.
3. Information accessing in some form either through research or survey
Participating classes were encouraged to research materials to be used in their products in order to identify recycled materials that could be included in its construction. The depth of this research and its outcomes depended on the teacher.
4. Information processing such that students are drawing a conclusion about the data they have collected
Classes were also encourage to conduct market research, to develop surveys and then analyze the results to get input on the possible success of their product ideas.
5. The construction of a unique and valuable information product
Although their sales pitches were not of particular value to other people, the students knew that they would be read and that other students would be make decisions about the effectiveness of their products, resulting in orders.
6. Self assessment
This is perhaps the best part of the Eco-Marketing Project. Students are encouraged to evaluate their own work and to improve it based on the student-centered outcomes…sales.
Types of Online Projects
No one has done as much thinking about online projects as has Dr. Judi Harris of the University of Texas in Austin. In 1994 and 1995, she published a column in The Computing Teacher, published by the International Society for Technology in Education (). In this column, called Minding the Internet, Judi described a structure of online instructional projects with categories that fell into one of three main genres. They were:
1. Interpersonal Exchanges
2. Information Collections
3. Problem Solving Projects
I am going to paraphrase a few of Harris' categories. You can read the full text of her column on the Internet. The URLs are provided below.
"Keypals"
This is probably the first type of online project conducted over the Internet, and it is a frequent first leap into instructional Internet projects for many teachers. In most cases it involves individual students in one class being matched up with individual students in another class in a different geographic location. The students send e-mail messages back and forth, usually on topics of their choosing.
The value of these projects is improved writing. Research has shown that students write more, in greater detail, taking great care with spelling, grammar, and punctuation when writing to distant audiences over the Internet (Cohen & Riel, American Educational Research Journal; v26 n2 p143-59 Sum 1989).
The downside of "Keypal" projects is the coordination that they require. Managing the constant exchange of e-mail with specific matches for each student in the class turns this seemingly simple project into a management challenge.
Global Classrooms
Global Classrooms are different from "Keypal" projects in two important ways.
1. The classes communicate with each other rather than individual students
2. The communication is more structured and on topics related more with the curriculum
The North Carolina Center for International Understanding () organizes Global Classroom projects between rural schools in North Carolina and schools in other parts of the world. The teachers meet on-line and discuss project ideas. One issue that classes in the USA and Japan discussed what how teenagers spend their leisure time. This gave both groups of students special insights into the cultural differences and similarity between the two countries.
Electronic "Appearances"
We have all invited guest speakers into our classes to share information about their job or travels. The Internet provides a link with a world of guest speakers who are willing be interviewed by your class via e-mail, or even chat or video conferencing sessions. There are a number of projects on the Internet that offer experts of whom students can ask questions.
The New Jersey Network Infrastructure in Education project has a web page that links to a variety of "ask an expert" projects on the Internet. Just choose the type of expert you are looking for.
Impersonations
This is fun. You have students communicating over the Internet with someone who is pretending to be someone else, or the students impersonating someone themselves.
Impersonation projects probably started at the University of Virginia, when educational history professor, Jennings Waggoner, "became" Thomas Jefferson over e-mail and offered himself to local elementary schools for interview through e-mail. One of the first on-line projects that I developed was called HistoryLink. Fifth graders from two elementary schools drew out of a hat the names of famous people in history. Each student wrote an e-mail message to their famous person, asking them about their life and times. The messages to e-mailed to the local high school where senior English students conducted research and used a lot of imagination to pretend to be those famous people in history, answering the fifth graders' questions. Then the historic figures ask their own questions from the perspective people asking about their futures.
Virtual Gatherings
Virtual gatherings are characterized by students gathering from different geographic locations at a specific cyber location in real time. Perhaps the best example of this is students meeting in a MUD. Here, students can meet at the same time and collaborate in the construction of the MUD environment or explore a prepared MUD to solve a problem a problem.
The complete descriptions of Dr. Harris' projects structure can be found at:
|Finding Existing Online Projects |
|Site Name |URL |
|Global School House | |
|IEARN | |
|Pitsco's Launch to | |
|Online Collaborative | |
|Projects | |
|Houghton Mifflin | |
|Company Project Watch | |
|TEAMS Classroom | |
|Projects | |
|KIDLINK Special | |
|Projects | |
|The Learning Space | |
|TENET | |
Developing & Publishing Your Own Online Projects
This is another tough one to describe. Dozens of online projects are announced on the Internet each day and each one is different. There are templates available to help you structure your proposal, and you should use them. But do a whole lot of thinking and planning first.
Here are some steps that you will likely move through during the development and implementation of the project:
1. Identify a need. What is the problem that you want to solve? What instructional goals or objectives do you think could be more effectively learned by your students by participating in your on-line project.
a. The goals or objectives that you want to achieve with the project will likely be part of your state or local curriculum standards
b. The goals or objectives should be measurable.
c. The goals or objectives should be common so that your project solution will be appealing to other teachers.
2. Inventory the hardware, software, infrastructure, and skills that you have along with the staff that are available to you.
a. Do you have access to computers that can run web browsers, e-mail and other communication clients?
b. Do you have access to the software that you and your students will need to achieve the type of communication that you would like?
c. Is your infrastructure such that your students can accomplish the communication that you would like and is the infrastructure reliable enough that other classes can depend on your project?
3. Design the project. The best approach to take in designing your project is to work backward.
a. What do you want students to be able to do or know as a result of the project?
b. What actions by the students will help them develop the target skill or knowledge?
c. How could those actions be aligned with real-world applications? How can you add relevance to what the students will be doing?
d. In what ways can you integrate what the students would be doing with other goals or objectives and other disciplines?
e. How will the project work? Remember the components of online projects from earlier in the book, and remember that not all projects must have all components, but each adds dimension and richness to the students' experience.
|Note: Make every effort to economize your project. Find ways to automate the management as much as |
|possible. Every minute that you are spending managing the project is a minute that your students are |
|without your consulting. |
4. Design a strategy for evaluation. How will you measure the success of your project.
5. Write a project proposal. Once again, there are a number of templates available on the Internet for writing project proposals.
How to Design a Successful Project -- An article written by Yvonne Andres & Al Rogers
Telecommunications in the Classroom: Keys to Successful Telecomputing -- An article by Al Rogers, Yvonne Andres, Tom Clauset, and Pam Jack
6. Promote your project.
a. Look for mailing lists, newsgroups, and web forums that cater to the types of teachers who would be interested in participating in your project.
b. Register your project on the Global School House Projects Registry ().
c. If you are going to a conference or other meeting where potential participating teachers might be found, draw up a flyer to pass out. Take great care in designing your flyer. Include the instructional objectives, the highlights of what the students will be doing, and the outcome product. Also take a picture of your class, digitize it and include it on the flyer. Most importantly, make your contact information as clear as possible.
You've dropped your hook and worm into the water. Now wait for a bite.
Tools for Collaborating
Mailing Lists
Establish your own private (or public) mailing list. Applications might include:
• A mailing list for the staff of your school or for types of teachers in your district
• A mailing list for a planning committee for your school or district
• A mailing list for your students that includes students in other places for cultural collaborations
• A mailing list for identified experts in a specific field of study, which they use to discuss issues of interest to your class. The students can access the archive of their online conversations as locally generated content.
|Mailing List Managers |
|Service |URL |
|ListBot | |
|OneList | |
|E-Groups | |
|* Most of these services involve discreet advertising for income. |
Online Discussion Forums
An online discussion forum is not terribly unlike a mailing list. They both allow people to communicate within communities. The difference between the two is similar to the difference between
1. a commercial or political mailing list that you might belong to that sends letters to your mail box by the street and
2. a bulletin board on the corner downtown or in the entrance of a grocery store.
With a mailing list, all of the messages come to your e-mail box. To participate in an online discussion forum, you have to go to a place on the Internet, usually a web page, and view a list of the messages that have been posted. When you click a title, you get to read the message. Upon reading the message, you can click Respond, and type a response message that will be listed beneath the message that you have just read.
|Discussion Forums |
|Service |URL |
| | |
|Beseen | |
|BraveNet | |
|* Most of these services involve discreet advertising for income. |
Chat Rooms
It is now possible to set up your own chat room for your students and students in other parts of the world. Here are several services on the Internet that enable you to establish chat portals through your school or classroom web page.
|Chat Rooms |
|Service |URL |
|IRC. | |
|CrZyChat | |
|MultiChat | |
| | |
|ParaChat | |
| | |
Rich & Interactive Information Resources
Topic Oriented Directories
Using topic-oriented directories is very much like browsing a library. You look for the shelves that hold books about the subject for which you are looking. Then you walk along those shelves looking for the book(s) on your specific topic of interest.
Topic-oriented directories organize Internet resources logically, by subject. They organize the resources in a hierarchical structure providing a list of general subjects, each subject leading to a list of topics within that subject, each topic leading to sub-topics, and usually to more subtopics. Eventually, you are presented with a list of Internet resources or websites, each related to the final subtopic that you selected.
|Topic Oriented Directories |
|Service |URL |
|Yahoo | |
|Yahooligans | |
|Yahoo for children | |
|Galaxy | |
|NewHoo | |
|Netscape Netcenter | |
|Internet Start | |
|LookSmart | |
|Snap | |
|Àpali | |
|Spanish Languages Directory | |
|Native Search | |
|Directory of Native American web | |
|resources | |
|Education Related Directories |
|G.R.A.D.E.S. | |
|from Classroom Connect | |
|Kathy Schrock's Guide for | |
|Educators | |
|Planet K-12 | |
|Blue Web'n | |
Search Engines
Search engines are the miracle of the Internet. These sophisticated tools seem to reach right into the global network, and scour its contents at your command. In reality, they do not work exactly in this way, although the true nature of search engines is no less fascinating.
|Search Engines |
|Search Engine |URL |
|Alta Vista | |
|Excite | |
|HotBot | |
|Infoseek | |
|Lycos | |
| |
|Kid Friendly Search Engines (Crawler style search engines that work to filter out adult material) |
|Ask Jeeves | |
|Disney Internet Guide (DIG) | |
|Lycos SafetyNet | |
| |
|Meta Search Engines (search engines that search other search engines) |
|MetaCrawler | |
|DogPile | |
|Highway 61 | |
The Language of Search Engines
Search engines are your helpers. They are information assistants who aid you in finding the information that you need to solve a problem, answer a question, or make a decision. Like any other assistant, the degree to which they are able to help depends on the degree to which you are able to tell them what you want. Therefore, communicating with your search engine is a critical part of the search process.
Search engines need to know what information you seek, and they need this information communicated in a logical way -- they are, after all, computers. The language that we traditionally use to talk with computer-based searching tools is called boolean, named after George Boole, a mathematician of the 19th century.
In Boolean Logic we use keywords to describe what words to look for when searching the index. We also use operators to describe the relationships between our keywords and the information that we need. The basic operators are AND, OR, and NOT.
Let's use an example to explore how we would use Boolean Logic to search for information on the Internet. We will look for information about Native Americans in the state of Ohio. In the table below we will explore several concepts involved in speaking Boolean and relate these concepts to our search.
|Concept |Explanation/Example |
|Keyword |A keyword is a word or term that we want the search engine to consider in looking for |
| |relevant information. In our example one world that would likely appear in a web page |
| |about Native Americans is Indian. |
| |Example: |Indian |
|OR |In many cases, there may be a synonym of our keyword that might appear in the web page |
| |instead of the keyword we have already chosen. So we will want to expand the number of |
| |pages that the search engine sends us to include the ones using the synonym. In the case|
| |of our example, many web pages would likely use the term Native American, which is more |
| |commonly used today than Indian. In this case we would use the operator, OR, to say that|
| |we want web pages with either the word Indian or the term Native American. |
| |Example: |Indian OR Native American |
|AND |Since we are looking for information about Native Americans in the state of Ohio, then |
| |an additional keyword will be Ohio. We want to narrow the web pages that we get to only |
| |those about Native Americans in Ohio, so we will say that both terms must be present. |
| |Here is where we will use AND. |
| |Example: |Indian OR Native American AND Ohio |
|NOT |As we think through the information that we are likely to receive, we realize that there|
| |is a baseball team in Cleveland, Ohio called the Indians. We will want to filter out all|
| |web pages about the baseball team. So we will add a new keyword, baseball, and connected|
| |it to our search express with the operator, Not. We are saying that the acceptable web |
| |page should NOT have the keyword baseball in it. |
| |Example: |Indian OR Native American AND Ohio NOT baseball |
|quotes |Just as we use commas, question marks, and other punctuation to help communicate with |
| |people, we use special symbols to clarify what we want from a search engine. One example|
| |is the use of quotation marks to define phrases. In our example, Native American is |
| |going to look like two separate words to the search engine that could each appear any |
| |place in the web page. To communicate that these two words belong together as a distinct|
| |phrase, we use quotes. |
| |Example: |Indian OR "Native American" AND Ohio NOT baseball |
|Parentheses |Each operator in a search expression defines a distinct keyword concept. |
| |Keyword 1 AND Keyword 2 |
| |Keyword 3 OR Keyword 4 |
| |Keyword 5 NOT Keyword 6 |
| |A keyword concept can consist of: |
| |A single keyword or phrase |
| |Two single keywords or phrases connected by an operator |
| |Keyword concepts connected by an operator to other keyword concepts or single keywords |
| |or phrases. |
| |Individual keyword concepts are marked by enclosing them in parentheses. In our example,|
| |the following are distinct keyword concepts: |
| |Indian |
| |(Indian OR "Native American") |
| |((Indian OR "Native American") AND Ohio) |
| |The final keyword concept, the one that includes all constituent keyword concepts is |
| |called our search expression. |
| |Example: |((Indian OR "Native American") AND Ohio) NOT baseball |
Admittedly, Boolean Logic is not the simplest thing to understand or teach. However, it is a very effective way of communicating with search engines your information needs.
To make things easier for casual users, Internet search engines have developed alternatives to traditional Boolean Logic. One of the most common conventions is the use of pluses (+) and minuses (-), to indicate which terms must (+) and must not (-) be present in the returned documents. Each search engine has developed its own version of these searching conventions, each trying to improve upon these standards, and this evolution of the search language continues. None is perfect and you will find that finding information from the Internet is more a process than the click of a button.
|An Alternative Search Convention |
|Pluses (+) |Any keywords in your search expression that MUST appear in your target |
| |web page should be preceded by a plus symbol (+). |
| |If the keyword is a phrase, then it should be enclosed by quotes |
| |Example: +basketball +"Mike Jordan" |
|Minuses (-) |Any keyword that must NOT appear in your target web page should be |
| |preceded by a minus symbol (-). |
| |As when using the plus symbol, if the keyword is a phrase, then it should|
| |be enclosed by quotes. |
| |Example: +basketball +"Mike Jordan" -Nike |
|Pipe (|) |The pipe character helps you to fine tune your search. Place and pipe |
|This character is usually above |character between to search terms tells the search engine to search for |
|the backslash (\) |the first term and then search for the second term within the first |
| |term's hits. |
| |Example: Internet|Web |
Net-Smarts
Net-smarts is perhaps your most valuable tool in finding information on the Internet. It is a growing awareness of what is available on the Internet and how it works, and a growing sense of "where is the best first place to start?" As mentioned earlier, searching the Internet involves investigating an information environment, turning over stones, checking for fingerprints, examining strands of hair. It means having an idea of what you are looking for, and at the same time being open for the unexpected.
More than anything, being net-smart involves asking questions. Here are some questions that must be asked and considered when embarking on an information safari on the Internet.
1. What do you want to find?
2. Will the information most likely be found in articles, company web pages, software, conferences, discussion groups, or people. The answer to this question helps you decide on a search strategy.
3. Why would someone publish this information on the Internet?
4. Who would publish this information on the Internet?
5. Who would host this information on the Internet?
6. What would a web page with the Information I seek look like?
Questions two through five would each help us in developing our search phrase.
7. Are you wanting to broaden your knowledge of a general topic or do you want more narrow, specific information?
Broad or general information is usually best found in topic-oriented directories. More information on more specific topics is best found with search engines.
The S.E.A.R.C.H. Process
Conducting effective searches of the Internet is rarely a matter of typing in a single keyword and being presented with the solution to your problem. It is much more frequently a series of searches, each revealing more clues about the information that is available, and where that information can be found.
Developing a search process can be difficult, because each person's process depends on their personal style of using information and the particular types of information that they typically need. However, there is a process that can be used as a springboard to the personal procedures that you develop with experience. The process is called S.E.A.R.C.H. It is an acronym for the process that has you Start with a small database search tool, Edit your search expression, Advance to a larger database search tool, Refine your search phrase, Cycle back and advance again, and finally, Harvest your information gems.
Search Strategy
|Search with a key term on Yahoo or another small index search tool. |Notes: |
| |You start with a small index search tool for two reasons: | |
| |You will receive a limited and manageable number of hits. | |
| |The hits that you get will be representative of what is available on the subject | |
| |Examine the hit pages collecting words that are common among the relevant hits and words that are | |
| |common among the irrelevant hits. | |
|Edit the search expression with terms gleaned from the initial search. | |
| |Add words collected from the initial search, including words common among relevant and irrelevant | |
| |pages. Construct a boolean search expression that effectively communicates the information that you | |
| |seek. | |
|Advance into more advances and extensive search engines | |
| |Enter the edited search phrase into a larger index search tool. Examples are: | |
| |Excite | |
| |InfoSeek | |
| |Alta Vista | |
| |HotBot | |
|Refine the search expression | |
| |Explore the pages reported by the larger search engine and refine the expression even more, further | |
| |defining the relevant hits, and filtering the irrelevant. Again, examine both good hits and bad | |
| |hits. | |
|Cycle back and Advance again. | |
| |Return to the advanced search engine that you used before or use another search engine. | |
|Harvest the results | |
| |Collect the needed information by printing, downloading, forwarding by e-mail or just | |
| |reading. | |
Web Pages Worth Bookmarking
|Educational Web Directories | |
|Service |Description |
|Landmarks for Schools |This website is dedicated to providing teachers with links to information raw |
| |materials with which they can create learning resources and their students can |
| |construct information products. |
| | |
|Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators |This is a rich and regularly updated list of links organized specifically for |
| |teachers. |
| | |
|Education World |This is a long-standing and content rich site that whose history include the old |
| |Weekly Reader. The site includes lists of links organized by subject area. This |
| |site also includes articles written for and by teachers. |
| | |
|Blue Web’n |Another old resource with lots of annotated sites organized by content or by subject.|
| |The site also includes a very powerful search tool for finding sites at the subject |
| |area and grade level for you. A real time saver for busy teachers. |
| | |
|Global SchoolNet Foundation |Recently purchased by Lightspan, Inc., the people at GSN probably know more about |
| |online instructional projects than anyone else. Their projects are among the best in|
| |the world, and their Projects Registry tool allow teachers from all over to develop |
| |and publish their project ideas for collaborators. |
| | |
|ThinkQuest |ThinkQuest is not just a project for students to create web pages, but it is also a |
| |library of more than a thousand web sites created explicitly to help people learn. |
| | |
|Commercial & Public Sites | |
|Service |Description & URL |
|PBS Online |This website offers a wide variety of resources for teachers to be used in |
| |conjunction with PBS programming. |
| | |
|Discovery Channel Online |Like PBS, this website offers materials and other opportunities to be used with their|
| |programming. |
| | |
|The History Channel |This site has a wealth of material. One of the most interesting resources is Great |
| |Speeches, an archive of recordings (Real Audio files) of great speeches of our |
| |century. The include Mahatma Gandhi, Jimmy Hoffa., LBJ, George Bernard Shaw, and |
| |Babe Ruth. |
| | |
|CNN Interactive |This rich website hold a large number of resources for teachers of just about any |
| |discipline. On valuable resource is the Transcripts service which stores the text |
| |transcripts for CNN programming over the past week or so. |
| | |
| |
| |Video Archive is another useful service. It is a searchable database of video files |
| |(QuickTime). A search of biotechnology returned 76 clips. |
| | |
| |CNN offers another service that could be useful for teachers. Called Custom News, |
| |teachers can indicate the specific issues that they are interested in based on |
| |current and upcoming units of study, and CNN will build a custom page with links to |
| |current stories on those issues. |
| | |
|Earth Science Enterprise from NASA |This rich resources provides links to a wide variety of web sites falling under each |
| |of the following categories: air, water, land, life, sun. |
| | |
| |Earth Science Enterprise also has an archive if images that can be used in learning |
| |materials. |
| | |
| |
Evaluating Internet Resources
There was a time, only a few years ago, when all you had to say was, "I got this information from the Internet," and it was considered gospel. At that time, the only people who could publish on this growing network were research centers and Universities, and the information was largely scholarly in nature.
Today, just about anyone can publish on the Internet. People can bypass the editors, who provided a level of filtering, and make their information almost instantly available to a global audience -- and it costs almost nothing.
This presents many problems for those of us who use digital information. But it is important to note that these problems are neither unique nor brand new. Critical evaluation of information has been necessary since humankind first learned to communicate and it has been part of most curricula for years. Yet never before has it become so easy for so many to communicate so effectively and so broadly. This presents a special challenge to schools and other similarly information intensive institutions. How do you tell if it's the true and valuable.
The Problems
Reliability
Reliability of information on the Internet refers most often to the correctness of information found on the Internet. However, the issue is complicated by time factors and other constraints that can render information undependable. We must go beyond asking if the information is accurate, and explore under what conditions will it remain accurate. Will it remain up to date for the duration of the information product you or your students are producing? If information is time sensitive, then the author should include a date published and/or a date last revised. If this information is not provided and the information is worthy of further investigation, you can look for contact information on the author and use e-mail to seek these dates directly from the author.
Credibility
Credibility refers more to the origins of the information. Does the author and/or the publishing organization have the authority to produce the information and to present it the way that they have. There should be information about the author or links to a web page that presents his or her credentials. Along with these credentials should be links to other documents that the author has published.
Perspective & Purpose
Perspective & Purpose refers to bias. What does the author or publishing organization have to gain by publishing this information? Is there a reason why they would want to present it in a particular way or from a certain angle. Are they selling a product? Are they supporting a specific political agenda? Do they have an axe to grind?
There are several questions to ask about the information you have found:
1. Is it accurate?
2. Under what conditions will it stop being accurate?
3. On what basis was the information generated?
a. Well designed research
b. Experience or education
c. Intuition
d. Opinion
4. Why was the information published and as a service to whom?
5. What does the publishing organization have to gain by publishing this information and in this way?
Techniques for Investigating Net Resources
Who's Backing the Author?
Since the domain of the author's e-mail address is unique (not @ or @, we might try accessing a web page with the domain. We would try to access: . If we find that the organization that is providing Mr. Warlick with an e-mail address sells a product that he is promoting, then we have an indication of possible bias. We can continue to investigate the site if appropriate, looking for mission statements, products (not just for sale) that related to the article, and references to the author.
Who's Standing Behind the Curtain?
We can also check the owner of the Landmarks for Schools website by going to a service on the Internet that will tell you who owns the domain. We go to:
Here we type the domain, landmark- into the form and click the Search button. After a moment we receive a report on who owns and maintains the domain name for the web server.
Backtracking the URL
We can find more information about the publishing organization by examining the article's URL. Backtracking a URL involves removing elements of it one by one. Each element is separated by a forward slash (/). So we start removing elements to the right until we get another web page:
This page appears to be a resource page for teachers. We backup again until we receive another web page.
Here we get the English version of the Media Awareness Network home page. We can explore this page and connected pages for information that would be helpful in determining any bias in their choosing to publish Mr. Warlick's work.
Looking for Endorsements
One way of examining the reputation of an Internet resource is to learn who else is using it. The Alta Vista search engine has a unique feature where if you type “link:” and the URL of the web page you are investigating (minus the “http://”), it will return a list of web pages on the Net that link to that page. You can then examine those pages, looking at the context in which they link to the page you are considering.
Goals-based Evaluation of Internet Resources
Briefly, this strategy approaches web evaluation through the nature of the assignment. Web pages should not be evaluated on the basis of the same criteria, but on the goals of the work that the student (professional) is doing. If students have authentic goals for the information product they are producing, then those goals become the basis for selecting appropriate resources.
There is an information collection form based on this approach on the web at:
A full article on this approach is available at:
Harvesting & Processing Web Resources
In the Information age, where information is a raw material, we need to be able to mine the Net for valuable information, and to be able to work with that information, adding value to it as teaching tools, and for giving students powerful ways to express their acquired knowledge and skills.
Moving Text to a Word Processor
By copying text from a web page and pasting it into a word processor, students can use their Net finds as building blocks using the word processor to assemble them into unique and valuable reports and essays. But to take it a step further, imagine finding a file with all of the Inaugural Addresses of all the presidents of the United States. Then being about to move that file into a word processor and then use the find function of the word processor to find occurrences of keywords and phrases…analyzing US history as if it were a science.
Instructions --
Moving Tabular Data to a Spreadsheet
The Internet has an enormous amount of tabular data (columns and rows) from government, university, and research institutions. If this data can be moved into a spreadsheet program, then teachers and students can conduct powerful analysis of the authentic data by running statistical functions and plotting graphs.
Instructions –
Moving Images to a Graphics Program
Another type of resources that is easily available on the Internet are images. By moving images into a drawing or graphics program teachers can manipulate them so that they can be used as teaching tools. For instance, a digital map of Europe downloaded from the Internet might be annotated by the teacher to illustrate reasons for the 100 years war between England and France.
Instructions --
Contributive Expression
Instructional Benefits
As teachers, we know how well we learn things when we have to express them. We know that we learn things more powerfully when we express them to other people with a goal in mind. We know this especially well as teachers, because this is the nature of the job, expressing information to other people such that our audience understands and learns it. No one knows the content of any topic better than someone who teaches it.
Leveraging this sense of Self Expression was the first educational application of e-mail. During the middle 1980s, teachers in California used e-mail to provide their students with real audiences to whom they wrote. The idea was to promote better writing and to improve the retention of content.
"Writing is a communicative act, a way of sharing observations, information, thoughts or ideas with ourselves and others. Writing is usually directed to a person or persons for a specific purpose."
However, most writing in the classroom is decontextualized, or the context becomes writing for a grade. When writing to other students in other geographic locations 7th graders
▪ Wrote more,
▪ in greater detail,
▪ taking greater care with grammar,
▪ punctuation and
▪ spelling.*
Web Sites with Web Building Tutorials:
|HTML Reference Manual, from | |
|Sandia National Laboratories | |
|Compendium of HTML Elements, | |
|by Ron Woodall | |
|HTML Quick Reference, from the| |
|University of Kansas | |
Software for Building Web Pages:
|Software |Platform |URL |Approx. |
| | | |Cost |
|AOLPress |Win3.1 | |Free |
| |Win95 | | |
| |MacOS | | |
|Claris HomePage |Win95 | |$79.95 |
| |MacOS | |to |
| | | |$99.95 |
|Microsoft FrontPage|Win95 | |$119.99 |
| |MacOS | |to |
| | | |$139.99 |
|HTML Web Weaver |MacOS Shareware| |$25.00 |
|Lite | | | |
|Page Spinner |MacOS | |$25.00 |
| |Shareware | | |
|Arachnophilia |Win95 | |Free |
|CoffeeCup HTML |Win95 | |$40.00 |
|Editor++ Pro |Shareware | | |
Web Design
Getting information coded, onto a web server, and across tens of thousands of miles of Internet is easy. The hard part is designing the pages so that the information travels the 18 inches from the reader's screen into their understanding. In the Information Age, your information competes with gigabytes of other information, and it competes by being
• inviting,
• easy to scan, and
• easy to understand
Here are a few tips for designing your web pages.
1. Goals, Goals, Goals
Always consider your goals first. Also consider them last. Anything that you can do in the design of your web pages that helps you accomplish your goals is good design. What you want to accomplish with your website will always outweigh the rest of these suggestions.
2. Use images deliberately
If an image does not help you accomplish your goals, then don't use it. Images cost your web customers time. What they accomplish must be worth the time that they cost.
Keep images small, both in terms of disk space and the geographic space that they take up on your website. Scanned photographs and pictures from digital cameras tend to be smaller (file size) if they are saved as JPEG files. Pictures drawing with a graphics program tend to be smaller if they are saved as GIFs.
4. Use white space
White space is not the absence of information. It is a positive element that you use to arrange information on the page. White space draws attention to information by setting it apart.
Carefully arranged white space also gives a web page a polished and professional look. Along with small and well designed border images, white space can be used to give a web page a graphic intensive look, without taking a minute and a half to load.
5. Information layout and presentation -- design for scanning
Most people do not come to the Internet to read. They come to the Internet to learn. If they want to read, they curl up by a fire with a good book.
When people view a web page the scan rather than reading from top to bottom. When designing your pages, design for scanning. Identify text that your customers might be looking for and bold the text, or color it, or make it a different size. You want to distinguish the text from the surrounding information so that it will draw the scanning.
Using hanging indents is an effective way to design for scanning. Heading and subheadings should be bold, perhaps larger, but justified to the left of the screen (headings should not be centered). The text beneath the headings should be indented such that the scanning eye easily picks up the headings.
6. Menu size
Try to keep your page menus to less than seven items. People are less likely to read a long menu, preventing them for visiting any of the valuable links from your page. If menus offer fewer than seven options, then people are more likely to read them and to link to the information that will help them solve their problem.
If you need to have more than six options from a single page then have more than one menu listing. Select the most important options, the ones that would be most relevant to most of your readers, and make them a main menu with large and bold text. This is the menu that would draw the readers eye. Then if they see value in your website from this main menu, then their eyes will wonder to other menu listings.
7. Page size
Working a mouse is work. The less you make people use their mouse, the happier they are and the more positively they take your information. This requires that you make lots of decisions regarding page size. Your choices frequently are having a long web page that forces the reader to use his or her mouse to scroll down the page, or having lots of short pages, requiring the reader to click options from a menu.
Usually it is preferable to have smaller pages. They are easier to manage for the reader and give a greater sense of organization. However there are two very good reasons to go with longer pages. If the nature of the information and its use might cause the reader to scan the page for occurrences of specific words or phrases, then the long page has an advantage. The reader can use the Find feature that is in most browsers to search the entire content of the page for the word or phrase.
Another advantage of longer pages is the ability to print them. If the information is such that people would want to have a printed copy, then they can print the single long page once. If the information is divided into several shorter pages, then the user will have to print that many pages.
Another important consideration is the fact that most people do not scroll down a web page…at all. Their decision to scroll depends on what they see at the top of the page. Therefore, the top six inches of your web page is the most crucial part. This is where you place your hook. This is where you advertise the information, convincing the reader that he or she should scroll further.
Appendix
Glossary of Internet Terms
from Education Perspective
Anonymous FTP
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a very old method for accessing information from the Internet. Anonymous means that anyone can access files from this particular FTP site. Although we very rarely use FTP sites anymore, if you are downloading software from the Internet, it is likely coming from an FTP server.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth refers to the speed with which you are communicating with the Internet. In a sense, it is how big the pipe is through which the information is flowing. The higher the bandwidth, the faster the information flows. Bandwidths are usually described in terms of the kind of connection you have. With a modem, you may have a 28.8, 33.6, or 56.6kps modem. The higher the number to greater the bandwidth, the faster your web pages load. Your school may have a 56.6Kps line, an ISDN, DSL, Cable, or T1 line. T1 is the highest bandwidth used in most schools.
The bandwidth also indicates the types of communication that can take place. E-mail is practically with just about any speed of connection. With a 56.6kps modem in your home, you will be fairly happy with the speed of web pages. In a medium size school with lots of computers, practical use of web pages will require a T1 connection, because so many computers may be pulling through information at the same time.
In the future, the bandwidth will likely increase dramatically, even in our homes. We will likely be able to view video and other types of information that are impractical to impossible today.
Browser
A browser, a software program, is used to view and navigate web pages on the World Wide Web. The most popular web browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. In a sense, the browser is your steering wheel on the information highway.
Increasingly, the web browser is becoming our window on curriculum. Especially with distance learning, students are viewing and interacting strictly through the World Wide Web, through their web browsers. Textbook, and other curriculum providers will be moving their content to the Internet because it is so much cheaper than paper and gasoline.
Cookies
Cookies are tiny messages that some web sites plant in your computer. The cookie identifies you to the web site are the next time you visit. In some cases this is used to prevent you from having to type your password every time you visit the site. The site enters your password for you because it knows who you are by your computer’s cookies.
Another application might be to remember where you are in a lesson. When a student leaves an instructional web site, the site plants a cookie on the student’s computer reminding it where it left off. Then the next time that computer goes to that web site, it knows where you should start work again.
Many people are apprehensive about web sites planning information in their computers and for some very good reasons. Because of this, it is possible to set your computer so that it does not accept cookies or will let you know each time a site tries to leave a cookie so that you can accept or decline.
Cyberspace
This is a term that was coined by William Gibson, a prophetic writer of the 20th century. It refers to the fact that so much communication is taking place over distance via wires, and we are now spending so much of our time interacting with information and with other people over the Internet, that it is taking on a sense of place for us.
In education, this is especially true with online courses, where students attend classes, read their assignments, turn in their work, and collaborate with other students, all over the Internet. This place is called Cyberspace.
The idea of virtual place is a little uncomfortable for many, but what we as educations should be doing is learning how to leverage this sense of cyberspace to create unique and powerful learning experiences for our students.
Domain Name
When you talk about web sites and you refer to them as, , you are calling them by their domain name. If you want to set up your own educational or school web site with its own domain name, there are channels that you must go through in order to make sure that you get a domain name that is unique.
Domain names usually start with www (but not always), they have a word that describes what the computer does or who owns it, and a two or three letter extension that tells the type or location.
|Three letter extensions mean: |You can learn the official two-letter extensions and the countries |
|.com Commercial Organization |that they represent at: |
|.org Non-profit Organization | |
|.edu Post secondary Education Institution | |
|.gov Federal Government | |
|.mil USA Military | |
E-mail
E-mail is still the most often used tool on the Internet. In a sense it is electronic letter writing with the obvious advantage that the letters are delivered almost immediately and that recipients can respond to your letter (e-mail message) with the click of a button.
For educators, e-mail has many applications. Teachers can e-mail with other educators to share ideas, problems, solutions, successes, and more. It connects professionals in a way that was not possible only ten years ago.
Students are motivated by e-mail. When they send e-mail messages to each other they are performing authentic writing. They are communicating with a real audience with a real goal in mind. Teachers can construct valuable and powerful contexts for student e-mail projects that integrate communication and content together in powerful ways.
E-mail requires an e-mail program. The most often used programs in schools are Netscape Messenger (which comes with Netscape Communicator), and Microsoft’s Outlook Express (which is part of the Internet Explorer suite of programs). Others are Eudora and Pegasus Mail. Many schools are using web-based e-mail, where teachers and students can check their e-mail via web pages.
E-mail Address
You have to have an e-mail address to use e-mail. Usually, it is you name or some derivation of your name, followed by an “@” symbol, followed by the domain name of your ISP. There are many services on the Internet that are giving e-mail addresses to people for free. Hotmail (), Yahoo () are a couple.
For teachers, getting e-mail accounts for students is a challenge. One strategy is to have a separate, single e-mail account for your classroom, and have all students use that common address, which the teacher maintains and monitors. Another way is a new service called . Gaggle gives free e-mail addresses to students and the teacher can set up a wide variety of restrictions on who students can send mail to, receive mail from, and words or phrases that are allowed in the e-mails.
Ethernet
Ethernet refers to a type of network in your school. It refers to the local area network (LAN), which connects computers in your school to each other and to server computers that handle e-mail, card catalog, and other applications. If you do not have to dial up the Internet using a modem and phone line, then you are probably accessing the Internet through an Ethernet network.
FAQ
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. This is a very useful convention that came out of the Internet as a way of helping people with technical issues without having to answer every question…again and again. Teachers might adopt this technique by creating an FAQ file on their web site or on a bulletin board to answer students’ most frequently asked questions.
Fire Wall
A fire wall is a networking scheme that prevents certain types of communication between the local area network (LAN) and the Internet. For instance, fire walls can be set up to prevent FTP access from inside your school, or e-mail access, or to prevent people from the Internet from access information from computers inside the school.
Fire walls are established for security purposes. A school may have a policy against use of e-mail by students and teachers. They might enforce that policy by establishing a fire wall for e-mail type communication.
GIF
A GIF is a type of picture that you see on the Internet. GIF actually describes the format of the file and its filename will end with .gif. The other type of image file that you will see on the Internet is Jpeg with .jpg at the end of the filename.
Most graphics programs today will save image files as either GIF or Jpeg. If you are creating a picture for a web page for your students, save the image as a GIF and then save it again as a Jpeg. Then look to see which one is smaller. The small version will load faster on the web page. In some images Jpegs are smaller while others will be smaller as a GIF.
Hit
A hit refers to a web page being found by a search engine. If you are looking for web pages about the Civil War for your class, and you type Civil War into a search engine, you might receive 354,000 hits, separate web pages that have Civil War in the page somewhere. If you search again, and this time type “Civil War” AND confederacy, then you will receive fewer hits, because there are fewer web pages with both Civil War and confederacy.
Home Page (or homepage)
This term actually has several means. It might be the web page that the computers in your school or classroom are set to load when the web browser is started. This might be the school’s web page, or a research page built by the school media specialist, or a page created by the teacher as a starting place for his or her class.
A home page might also be the front page of a web site. It usually includes the name of the site, any identifying information about the site, and a menu that links to the other pages or sections of the site.
Sometimes, and entire web site is referred to as “my home page.” Of the these three definitions, the 2nd is probably the most accurate, today. Like so much of today’s high technology, terms and definitions change as the tools and their application change.
HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is a language that is used for creating web pages. HTML consists of codes (or tags) that describe to the Internet how a web page should look and how it should behave.
In the old days (five years ago) one had to type these codes into their document as they wrote the content in order to build web pages. Today, there are numerous programs that allow the web builder to design the page and enter the content as if they were using a word processor. The program inserts the HTML tags for you. Some of the most popular are:
|Microsoft Front Page Commercial |Claris Front Page Comercial |
|Netscape Composer Free |AOLPress Free |
|Dreamweaver Commercial |PageMill Commercial |
Hypertext
This is what makes the World Wide Web work. It is what is truly unique about the Internet. Hypertext means being able to click on a word or phrase (or picture) on a document and then learn more about that specific word or phrase (or picture).
Hypertext holds much promise for creating learning experiences for students. By embedding hyperlinks to associated pages within a document that students are to read or examine, the teacher can add a wealth of content, arranging it into a three dimensional information environment.
Internet
The Internet is actually a collection of interconnected networks world-wide that all talk in the same language, called TCP-IP. Because of this network of networks, we are able to communicate with people from all continents and to share information across the network. The word Internet always has a capital “I”.
Intranet
An intranet is a local network of web pages and other World Wide Web style resources. Intranets allow schools to set up web sites that are only available to the school. Students can use intranets to publish web pages for other students to use. Teachers can create web pages for their students to use that are only available to the students in your school.
ISP
ISP refers to your Internet Service Provider. This is the company with you have contracted for access to the Internet in your home. Some large ones include America OnLine, Mindspring, Earthlink, and many others.
Java
Java is a new language that allows people to build web pages that are much more interactive and functional. Many of the new educational web sites that act more like software programs probably include Java programs. We will likely see much more dynamic and interesting learning tools on the Internet as a result of Java.
Jpeg
This is a type of image that you will see on the Internet. The other type is GIF. These are the two types of image files that web browsers can read.
Most graphics programs today will save image files as either GIF or Jpeg. If you are creating a picture for a web page for your students, save the image as a GIF and then save it again as a Jpeg. Then look to see which one is smaller. The small version will load faster on the web page. In some images Jpegs are smaller while others will be smaller as a GIF.
Login
Many web pages require that you log in to the system by typing a login and a password. A login (sometimes called a user id) is a word the represents you. It might be your first name, your first name and some additional characters, or a handle (or nickname).
Web sites might require a login because you are paying for the service and you don’t want others to have access through your paid account. Another reason might be that through a login, the site identifies you and finds information about you from its database, and is able to customize the information to suit your needs or profile.
Mailing List (or maillist or listserv)
This is perhaps one of the most powerful tools on the Internet, and one of the oldest. Essential, a mailing list is a single e-mail address that represents a list of personal e-mail addresses owned by people who have a common interest, such as teaching reading. Any message that any member of the list sends to that e-mail address will be copied to all members, and any reply to that message will also be copied to all members.
Mailing lists provide an extremely powerful way for communities of people to share and grow information. It is a way to share problems, solutions, questions, answers, successes, and less successful experiences.
Modem
A modem is a device that allows computers to communicate with each other via telephone lines. Most modems have a number associated with them (28.8, 33.6, 56.6). The higher this number is, the faster your modem can communicate.
Password
A password is a string of characters (letters & numbers) that a computer system uses to determine if you have the right to enter. In a very real way the password is a key, and should be protect like a key. If you tell a student the password to a system, it is like giving that student a key to your room or to the building and making it easy for that student to give the key to as many other students as he or she likes. PROTECT YOUR PASSWORDS!
Plug-in
Plug-ins are programs that can be downloaded from the Internet and attached to your web browser. Each Plug-in adds capabilities to your browser for displaying specially prepared web pages.
Two specific Plug-ins are especially suited for education. The first is the HyperStudio plug-in. This one allows people to play HyperStudio stacks through their web browsers. Students can post their stack on the Internet and then friends and relatives (with the Plug-in) can view the student’s work.
Another Plug-in that is useful is Shockwave. Shockwave pages can be especially interactive with great potential for instructional experiences. It is important not to add every plug-in you run across, as you increase your likelihood for causing conflicts in your computer.
Search Engine
A search engine is a tool for finding the needed information on the Internet. They build indexes or databases of web pages on the Internet using tiny traveling programs called spiders. When you type a keyword or search phrase into the search engine, it searches its index and shows you a list of pages (hits) have the keyword or that fulfill your search phrase.
For teachers, conducting deep research on the Internet using special techniques can help in creating new and powerful teaching tools for students.
URL
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is an address for an individual web page. It includes the domain name of the computer that holds the page, and then the path (folders and subfolders) to the file. A URL of…
goes to a computer called , a folder called files and a folder inside that folder called subfiles, and finally a file called page.html.
Web Directory
A web directory is a web site that stores information on a wide variety of web pages on the Internet. The directory organizes the web sites into subject and topics of subject. By browsing the subject and topics and subtopics, people can find information to solve their problems are answer their questions.
Students can use web directories to explore subjects being studied in class. Given a subject they can learn more about it by examining where it resides in the subject tree of the directory, and then by exploring some of the web sites that are offered by the directory.
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a collection of millions of web pages that are interconnected by hyperlinks. It consists of individual web pages, web directories that organize many of the web pages by subject and topic, search engines that look forward web pages by keyword, and a wide variety of interactive web pages that people can use in a variety of ways.
It is fair to say that the World Wide Web is revolutionizing communication and that it has to potential to revolutionize education.
* Cohen, Moshe. Riel, Margaret. Computer Networks: Creating Real Audiences for Students' Writing. August 1986
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We tend to remember
5% Lecture
10% Reading
20% Audio Visual
30% Demonstration
50% Discussing
75% Practicing
90% Teaching Others
The Learning Triangle
Attributed to the "National Training Laboratories" in Bethel Maine.
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