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 26,380
subscribers to the newsletter.
Berkman
Center: Around twenty countries, including China, Iran, Tunisia
and Vietnam, runs its Internet traffic through a state-run service
provider, which bans blacklisted foreign websites. Harvard's Berkman
Center is attempting to document and analyze a large number of Web
pages blocked by various types of filtering regimes, and ultimately
create a distributed tool enabling Internet users worldwide to gather
and relay such data from their respective locations on the Internet.
By typing in the addressing of a website, the Berkman Center will
tell you if it is currently being blocked by the Chinese authorities.
BBC
Educational Content: The BBC is still waiting for culture secretary,
Tessa Jowell, to give permission for it to spend £150m on producing
free online materials tailored specifically to the national curriculum.
A report by the independent consultants, SRU, commissioned by the
Digital Learning Alliance, has claimed that if the plan goes ahead,
it will destroy the commercial companies in the market and will reduce
the overall quality of online educational resources. SRU argues that
in order to offset the impact of the BBC and maintain effective competition
the government would need to provide at least £800m of ring-fenced
funding over five years.
Curriculum
Online: In December 2001 Tony Blair announced a plan to provide
schools with £50m worth of "Electronic Learning Credits"
during the 2002-03 year which they can put towards buying digital
resources. Curriculum Online was due to be launched in September but
this week the DfES announced that it had failed to meet its deadlines
and therefore the project has been postponed. A spokesman for the
DfES said that an announcement about the new date for the start of
the scheme was "not far away".
History
Major
Sullivan Ballou: People world wide are touched by the tenderness
that reaches out across 150 years in the farewell love letter that
Major Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife during the American Civil
War. Major Ballou was a volunteer soldier who served in the Second
Rhode Island Regiment of the Union Army. Prior to the war he was an
attorney and a rising politician in his native state, a doting father
to two young sons and a husband in love with his young wife. On duty
near Washington D.C., he had a premonition that he would not survive
the next battle. He wrote his family how much he loved them and promised
to look after them from the afterlife, where he hoped to be reunited
with them one day. He was mortally wounded in that battle and died
a week later, never seeing them again. The website tells some of their
story.
Ancestry:
The Ancestry website now has a collection of new databases with family
names. To date, Ancestry has (last name) names in over 3000 databases.
This includes the
1850 Federal Census Index, the American Civil War Soldiers database,
the Gene Pool Database, the Biography & Genealogy Master Index
(BGMI) and the Social Security Death Index. The Ancestry website is
currently offering a 14 day free trial.
Burke's
Landed Gentry Ireland: The 19th Edition of Burke's Landed Gentry,
Vol. 2, features Irish records. The online version features the significant
non-titled land owners in Ireland and their family histories, most
of which stretch back many centuries. Many of the individuals recorded
held senior military and political posts, and owned some of Ireland's
major castles and stately homes. They were the influential people
who shaped and contributed to Ireland's heritage. The launch of this
online collection is backed by articles and useful resources, and
is therefore a key website to anyone interested in Irish nobility
and family history.
English
Literature
Poetry
Showcase: TeachIt believes that the Internet should be a two way
process, with students able to upload their own work as well as downloading
ideas and information. For this reason they are now offering a 'virtual
classroom display' where teachers can reward and motivate effort by
publishing students' work. And, if the glory is not enough reward
the first 50 young writers will also receive their own Oxford Schools
Dictionary. The Poetry Showcase 2002 will be running alongside National
Poetry Day on October 10th and Teachit are inviting poems on the subject
of celebration.
Novel
Guide: This free website provides an educational supplement for
better understanding of contemporary and classic literature. It currently
features 72 books but it adds more each week. Recent additions include
Measure for Measure, Huckleberry Finn, and Notes from the Underground.
The most popular books with students include Lord of the Flies, Animal
Farm and The Great Gatsby. The material is divided into six sections:
Novel Summary, Character Profiles, Metaphor Analysis, Theme Analysis,
Top Ten Quotes and a Biography.
Art
Drawing
Together: As part of the Big Draw 2002, The Campaign for Drawing
and AccessArt have collaborated to create an online drawing resource
entitled "Drawing Together". Accessible from both the Drawing
Power web site and the AccessArt site, Drawing Together aims to engage
directly with children and to enthuse and inspire them with ideas
which will enable them to explore drawing in a variety of ways. Drawing
Together will present ideas through a highly illustrative, animated
and interactive digital resource which will appeal to children aged
8 and upwards. The main aim behind the resource is to encourage children
to draw, to make mistakes, learn new techniques, show ideas to friends,
swap methods, experiment and most of all have fun!
Draw
a Story: The Draw a Story for Me project, organized by Patti Weeg,
helps children as they begin global communication and recognize and
celebrate their cultural diversity. Participating students are encouraged
to share drawings and images, and text if possible, that tell the
stories of their every day life. Students may join the project at
any time of the year and all languages are welcome. To find out more
about the project, visit the project's webpage.
Internet
Services
Scout
Report: Published every Friday, continuously since 1994, the Scout
Report is one of the Internet's oldest and most respected publications.
It offers a selection of new and newly discovered online resources
of interest to researchers, educators, and anyone else with an interest
in high-quality online material. Every
day professional librarians, educators, and content specialists filter
hundreds of announcements looking for the most valuable and authoritative
resources available online. Information about the best of what we've
found is then summarized, organized, and provided to the Internet
community in various formats, including email and the Web. The Internet
Scout Project is located in the Department of Computer Sciences at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is sponsored by the National
Science Foundation.
Open
Directory: The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive
human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained
by a vast, global community of volunteer editors and is the most widely
distributed data base of web content classified by humans. The Open
Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself.
The plan is for well-informed individuals to organize a small portion
of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling
out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.
YouEMAIL
is an email that provides good looking graphic emails that say who
you are and what you like. All accounts are free and easy to use.
If you register by the 27th September you will receive a free graphic.
The graphics available cost no more than what you pay for mobile ring-tones
and graphics.
Book
Section
ISBN
0 521 43437 8
The Cambridge Guide
to Theatre is the most wide-ranging, readable and reliable
one-volume reference work on the theatre available today.
Embracing theatre worldwide, over 3,500 entries offer compendious
information on the performing arts from their inception to
the present day.
The Cambridge Illustrated
History of France is an
outstanding one-volume history of this fascinating country.
Special features and illustrated panels throughout on important
people, places, issues and events. In the introduction Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie writes that this authoritative, well-written
book "has no equivalent in recent writing about French
history".
Do
you want to have your website listed in our web directory? If so,
send a brief description (about 150 words) and the URL to spartacus@pavilion.co.uk.
