Education on the Internet
Number 34: 4th September 2002
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 26,670 subscribers to the newsletter.
All reviews are added to our web directory. There are sections on Primary Education, English, Mathematics, Science, Modern Languages, History, Geography, Design & Technology, Business Studies, Media Studies, ICT, Sociology, Music, Politics, Economics, Photography, Art & Design, Theatre Studies, Physical Education and Religious Studies.
John Simkin
Curriculum Online is set to launch this September with £50m of new funds available for schools in England to spend on digital learning resources in the school year 2002/3. The Department of Education will distribute £30m in September 2002 and a further £20m in April 2003 across all maintained schools, non-maintained special schools and referral units in England to spend on digital learning resources. These funds are known as e-Learning Credits and can only be spent on certified products and services and through retailers registered on the Curriculum Online portal. It is estimated that the smallest primary school will get £877 and the largest secondary £4,007 in 2002/3.
Learn Premium is a subscription service aimed at meeting teachers' and students' needs in the classroom. The service offers you unlimited access to thousands of pages of online lessons, randomly generated tests, web guides and work schemes. Learnpremium resources include the learn newsdesk, a daily news service for 9-13 year olds, unique geography video lessons for KS3 and 4, developed with 4learning, Channel 4's education division and hundreds of curriculum-based lessons in all core subjects at key stages 3, 4 and AS level. The annual subscription rates to learnpremium are divided into three levels: primary, middle and secondary. A good service that can be purchased with eLearning Credits (see above). For further details contact the Learn team on (020) 7886 9816.
Same-Language Subtitling: Can music-videos on TV herald a revolution in literacy? Yes, believes a young researcher Dr Brij Kothari, who after years of struggling is finally getting a chance to take his ideas forward once again at a wider national level across India. Kothari's method relies on getting neo-literates to do some reading while they are watching film-related entertainment. He calls his method 'same-language subtitling'. Conventional subtitling has meant transcribing-and-translating the dialogue in a different language from the original, mainly to allow an audience to understand a film in a language other than what it was originally made in. The lyrics of Hindi songs appear in Hindi, Tamil songs in Tamil, and so on in any language. The synchronisation of audio and text is created through colour changes in the subtitles, identifying every word as it is being sung. Subconsciously, neo-literates who are watching follow the text, and sing-along, thus strengthening their reading skills even as they enjoy the music.
elearningpost is a digest of daily links to articles and news stories about Corporate Learning, Community Building, Instructional Design, Knowledge Management, Personalization and more. Besides the daily links, elearningpost brings out feature articles and related special reports on the above topics. Past stories are archived by category and date and there is also a search facility available. You can also subscribe to elearningpost's daily newsletter.
Internet Services
Ask Jack: Past editions of the Guardian's impressive computer supplement, Online, can now be found on its Net News website. As well as the latest computer stories that have appeared in the newspaper you can also access Web Watch, Weblog and the excellent Ask Jack column. If you have any questions or comments about previous answers given by Jack Schofield, send an email to Jack.Schofield@guardian.co.uk.
DLL Files: Have you ever installed some software but when you try to run it you get a message that a particular DLL file cannot be found? If so, it is worth visiting this Swedish website that contains a multitude of DLL files to download. Each file download comes with a Readme text, which states the proper place to install the file.
Lockergnome Newsletters: Lockergnome provides free technology newsletters. Titles include Windows Daily (PC tips & tricks, critical updates, jargon definitions and industry news); Tech Specialist (reviews for Windows and Linux users, troubleshooting resources, IT job assistance); Digital Media (MP3s, streaming audio and video destinations, online radio stations, DVD reviews); Penguin Shell (latest from the Linux community, open source projects, distribution news, cross-platform tools) and Apple Core (dedicated to the world of Macintosh products).
English Literature
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is collection of digital documents. The scope of documents in the collection include items from American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy. The Catalogue has a number of unique features. First, not only can you search for and display texts from the collection, but you can also search the content of located texts. Moreover, you can search the content of multiple documents simultaneously. For example, you can first locate all the documents in the collection authored by Mark Twain. Next, you can search selected documents for something like "slav" (which includes slave, slaves, slavery, etc.) to draw out themes across texts.
Classic Short Stories: A collection of online electronic short stories by writers such as Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anton Chekhov, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ring Lardner, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, H. G. Wells, Jack London, William Carlos Williams, Evan Hunter and Roald Dahl.
Modern Languages
German Football: Now that the new football season has started, German teachers may be interested in this online project about German football and the Fußballbundesliga, with activities which are accessible for both beginners and advanced learners. The structure of the project lends itself to self-access work or cover work over several lessons. The home page explains the project clearly and provides links to 5 different mini-projects (exercises) as well as a very useful student checklist and assessment page which provides a structured format for marking the project. Exercise one features the Bundesliga, its structure and teams. In exercise two students find out about their chosen club. In exercise three, students choose a specific player to research with the help of structured questions. In exercise four students are given a budget to go shopping for merchandise. In exercise five students find out how to read out the most recent football results for their team and record them on tape. Each mini-project has a worksheet which can either be printed off or copied into a word processing document, and students work towards presenting their research results from each exercise in a different way, building their work up into a portfolio. Further whole class activities are suggested, including quizzes and listening exercises and there is plenty of opportunity for research in pairs or groups.
Modern Languages: Schemes of Work: The Standards Site is managed by the Department for Education and Employment's Standards and Effectiveness Unit (SEU). The main objective of the site is to supply teachers with "guidance and tools to help schools improve effectiveness, raise standards and reduce workload". Secondary Modern Foreign Language schemes of work are available for French, German and Spanish.
Science
Know Need: Chad Evans was a Head of Science at a school in London and is now a Biology teacher in a British School in Singapore. Here he is continually creating online material to be used in his classes. The website contains a large amount of revision notes (over 70 lesson topics) and a downloadable gallery of all the images that have been used. These downloaded images are in a form that can be altered and used in worksheets. There are also some online multiple choice questions based on the edexcel modular science syllabus.
Manhattan Project:On 2nd August, 1939, three Jewish scientists who had fled to the United States from Europe, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, wrote a joint letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about the developments that had been taking place in nuclear physics. They warned Roosevelt that scientists in Germany were working on the possibility of using uranium to produce nuclear weapons. Roosevelt responded by setting up a scientific advisory committee to investigate the matter. This eventually resulted in the Manhattan Project, a scheme to develop atomic weapons. This website provides an overview of the Manhattan Project and a collection of primary sources concerning the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Book Section
Shakespeare is Hard: Is Hamlet really mad or is the world mad? Are the witches in Macbeth an embarrassment or do they have relevance for a twenty-first-century audience? Is Othello merely gullible or is there something more profound about his place in society that makes him vulnerable? Why can there be no happy ending in King Lear? In this provocative but scholarly guide to Shakespearean tragedy Fintan O'Toole - Ireland's foremost theatre critic - shows how the plays have been made unintelligible to modern students by being filtered through a series of ideas that have nothing to do with what Shakespeare wrote, and often have everything to do with keeping the world safe for conservative values. (Granta, £6.99)
