Education on the Internet

Number 37: 25th 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 26,380 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

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

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.