Education
on the Internet
Number
34: 4th September 2002
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
spartacus@pavilion.co.uk
News
and Articles
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)
Available from Amazon
Books (order below)
