Education on the Internet
Number 120: 19th May, 2004
Introduction
Introduction
Education on the Internet is published by Spartacus Educational every week. The newsletter includes news, reviews of websites and articles on using ICT in the classroom. Members of the mailing list are invited to submit information for inclusion in future newsletters. In this way we hope to create a community of people involved in using the Internet in education. Currently there are 51,140 subscribers to the newsletter.
All reviews are added to our web directory. There are sections on Internet Services, Online Seminars, Primary Education, English, Mathematics, Science, Modern Languages, History, Geography, Design & Technology, Business Studies, Special Needs, Media Studies, ICT, Sociology, Music, Politics, Economics, Photography, Art & Design, Theatre Studies, Physical Education and Religious Studies.
John Simkin
Online Seminars
Hot-seating: Whilst all teachers would like to think that their classes hang onto their every word with grateful awe and rapture, students will actually get rather bored hearing the same voice wittering on at them day in, day out. Russel Tarr argues that hot-seating and role-plays allow teachers and students to use and hear different voices. Not only that, but bringing historical characters to life to answer questions about their lives, beliefs and achievements is a great way of imparting knowledge, understanding and issues of interpretation. If you have views on this subject, register with the History Forum and join the debate.
News and Articles
China and the Internet: China has a population of over a billion. So far only 70 million of them are online. That is just over 5% of the Chinese population. This is about to undergo a dramatic change. Five large Chinese companies have just announced that they are about to go public and expect to raise $1bn between them to expand their activities online. Registrations of Chinese websites is up 100% from last year. Economists have argued that if China is to become the world's economic superpower, it will have to expand its online activities. One expert said recently: "If people aren't thinking about what is about to happen when China logs on, they soon will." He adds that "if everyone in China went online at the same time, it would bring the whole net down".
School Improvement: The number of websites relevant to the area of school improvement has been expanding at a rapid rate in the last few years, so much so that it is now very difficult to make sense of and to be able to act upon, the vast amount of information available. A recent attempt to search the World Wide Web, using a popular search engine and the search term ‘school improvement’, led to the identification of over six million web pages: even when the enquiry was limited to the United Kingdom, over 400,000 sites were identified. How does the busy educational professional (or interested parent) find their way through this mass of school improvement-related websites, some of which contain extremely useful advice and resources, while others are largely useless and irrelevant? This NFER report aims to assist in this task, to help with the process of identifying useful school improvement websites and to make some brief suggestions as to how these can be used.
Internet and Freedom: Is the internet doing more harm than good? This is a question posed by a student in Australia. On this International Education Forum most people are agreed that the Internet does more good than harm. One contributor argues that the web has helped redistribute power from the rich to those who are intelligent enough to make full use of the medium. "Up until the development of the web mass communications was dominated by large multinational companies. This has now changed." If you have views on this subject, register with the International Education Forum and join the debate.
History
National SHP Conference: The SHP Conference will be held at Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds (2nd-4th July). You can register online or by writing to Marsha Stankler, Trinity & All Saints College, Horsforth, Leeds, LS18 5HD. The wide range of workshop topics will include Developing a School Website, The Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War, Textbooks and Technology, Interpretations: Developing Literacy and Citizenship, Effective Learning at KS3, Mentoring for Creative History Teachers, Using ICT for Interactive Lessons, American West Depth Study, Role Play, Teaching Crime & Punishment, Teaching Religion in History and Medicine Through Time for Slow Learners.
Assassination of President Kennedy: A detailed look at the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There are biographies of 272 people involved in the case: Major Figures (34), Important Witnesses (58), Investigators (88) and Possible Conspirators (92). Other sections include: Reports (4), Organizations and Operations (14) and Key Issues (4). The website also looks at the possibility that different organizations such as the Mafia, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, KGB and the John Birch Society might have been involved in the planning of the assassination. Other possibilities such as anti-Castro activists, Texas oil millionaires and the Warren Commission's lone-gunman theory are also looked at. The website has an activity section and a forum where students and teachers can enter into debate with the author of the material, other investigators and witnesses to the events of 1963.
Music
iTunes: You can set up iTunes to automatically add tunes from a CD to your library when you insert a disc into your computer. iTunes will even eject the disc when it’s done. Of course you can start the import process manually, too; it’s your preference. By default, iTunes compresses your music so you can fit thousands of songs on your computer or iPod, and stores your music in the same format as the iTunes music store. It’s called AAC, and builds upon state-of-the art signal processing technology from Dolby Labs.
Freeplay Music: It is claimed that Freeplay Music is the biggest, the best and the fastest growing "free" broadcast music production library in the world. Freeplay recently announce the launch of it's new web portal and online music library to the masses. Based on global acceptance, it has added a number of exciting new features, including our newly refined Terms Of Use, Rate Card and Automatically Generated Licensing Contracts. It has also added support for the entire library in Apple's new MPEG-4 AAC audio format.
Mass Media
Press Freedom: Freedom House has just published a report on press freedoms. As one would expect, European countries dominate the top rankings (Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Switzerland). However, one disturbing aspect is the position of Italy. It is ranked 74th (just below Benin and Mali). The report condemns Italy for “unbalanced” coverage of political events and says that it no better than Albania and Mongolia in terms of media independence. The report the decline in the quality of media coverage is linked to the rule of Silvio Berlusconi.
RadioWaves: This company supplies a unique network of online radio stations providing schools with their own stations and international broadcast platform. Learners can create your own stories in text, pictures and audio to publish online. Teachers totally control all content and all editors online. Schools have their own homepage and a pre-structured set of web pages on which to publish all content.
Sociology
A level Sociology: Andy Walker’s A level Sociology site is designed as a free distance learning resource for A1 and A2 students. The site uses powerpoint lectures and interactive games and quizzes to facilitate distance learning of course content. A dedicated Invision power board is also linked from the site to encourage home school links and peer group sociological discussion. Students and teachers of sociology are invited to join. The site is becoming increasingly popular amongst students and teachers alike and is a work in progress. Teachers who would like to submit content or ideas for the site are warmly invited to do so via e-mail”
BUBL Sociology: BUBL Information Service, based at Strathclyde University Library, is a searchable database of Internet resources of academic relevance. The websites are organized by Dewey Decimal Classification and can be searched by subject or class number. The sociology section includes General Resources, Anthropology, Social Interaction, Social Processes, Social Change, Population, Young People, Women, Social Classes, Racial & Ethnic Groups and Culture & Institutions.
ICT
Open Gateways: Sun is helping create the schools of the 21st century by developing new models of instruction, where students are able to utilize the network to become active learners and teachers are empowered with network-based tools that promote student centered instruction. Sun is also promoting a global Education Learning Community to create a set of standards connecting nations and academic institutions. The company hopes it can be used to share resources and for work on collaborative projects. Scott McNealy, chairman, president and CEO, Sun Microsystems claims: "Sun is always working to champion best practices in global education through the development of tools and technologies that give students a learning advantage and education leaders a budget advantage."
Innovative Teacher: The Innovative Teachers Program is based on two premises: That technology is a powerful catalyst to improve learning, and that teachers learn best from their peers. This program delivers free, high-quality professional development opportunities to districts and schools, based on the sharing and replication of exemplary learning projects. Created in partnership with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), Innovative Teachers is dedicated to bringing together a community of teachers as learners and facilitating the creation of collective knowledge. Other objectives include creating a platform for the advancement of best practices and adoption of innovation and providing training and access to technology resources.
Book Section
Who Shot JFK?: The Kennedy assassination remains the greatest whodunit of the post-war era - now this short book looks at the assassination through the work of the researchers who have refused to buy the official cover-up story that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin, exploring the major alternative theories; the major landmarks in the Kennedy assassination research; and the disinformation produced on the subject since the event, plus some startling new work that may finally solve the great mystery of the 20th century. (Robin Ramsay, Pocket Essentials, ISBN 1 904048 12 9)
