Education on the Internet
Number 46: 27th November 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 29,745 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
Association of Teacher Websites (ATW): How often have you visited an "educational" web site, only to find an apparently random jumble of pages that bear no relation to your subject, teaching or learning? The ATW is an association of websites created by the real experts - teachers. The ATW helps its members share ideas and work together. It provides a single portal, which is a guarantee of quality for pupils, teachers and parents. It does not charge its members for any services, and contributors share any organizational tasks. The ATW currently has 88 approved sites covering all curriculum areas and key stages.
eLearning Awards: European Schoolnet's prestigious eLearning Awards were presented for the third time at a prize ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden on 21 November 2002. Nineteen winning projects were picked out from more than 700 entries, and invited to present their projects to high-level experts from Ministries of Education all over the world and private companies. Winners received cash prizes or equipment for their schools. The eLearning Awards were launched as part of eSchola, an event to bring together schools all over Europe.
Simon's Raising Achievement Website: Produced by Simon Midgley, the aim of this website is to show how students' educational achievements may be increased. It does this both by linking to research, in the UK and around the world, on strategies which may help to raise achievement and by providing practical examples of teaching approaches and resources which may help educators do this more efficiently - and enjoyably! In particular, the site focuses on the emancipatory power of ICT - looking equally at theoretical and practical issues. Additionally, there is practical help and ideas for teachers and teaching assistants who are supporting dyslexic and other students who learn differently. To show how all of the ideas and strategies fit together in an actual school situation, details are included of the Raising Achievement project at one school, Rhyddings High in East Lancashire.
ERCs: The European Resource Centres for Schools and Colleges (ERCs) provide teachers and students with information on issues relating to Europe and support the development of the European dimension in the curriculum. The ERCs offer resources, many of them free, which can be used to introduce a valuable European and international dimension into the classroom. The inclusion of the European dimension in the classroom can broaden pupils' horizons and gives them an understanding of what it means to be a part of the European Union.
Internet Services
Quia Web is one of the world's most popular educational technology websites. It pioneered the "create-your-own" concept, giving teachers the ability to create customized educational software online, built around their own course materials and made available to students over the Web. The idea proved so popular that more than 300,000 teachers have registered to use the service. Quia provides templates for creating 14 different types of online activities, including flashcards, matching, concentration (memory), word search, hangman, jumbled words, ordered list, picture perfect, pop-ups, challenge board, scavenger hunt, rags to riches (a quiz-show style trivia game), columns, and cloze exercises. Quia also includes a directory of thousands of online activities and quizzes in more than 50 subject areas.
Hot Potatoes is a suite of programs published by Victoria University and Half-Baked Software. Teachers use the Hot Potatoes programs to create educational materials, especially exercises and tests. The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, crossword, matching/ordering, jumbled-sentence and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for non-profit educational users who make their pages available on the web.
Question Tools: Marking questions by hand is a time-consuming, expensive and sometimes inaccurate process. Question Tools will automatically mark tests and exams for you. Students and trainees can receive immediate and accurate feedback on their performance. Question Tools is a software suite that allows anyone with a Windows PC to create on-line tests and exams. The suite comprises: SimpleSet (a free and easy to use question editor), Exam (a free and secure alternative to delivering tests in a web browser), Editor (a professional’s tool for creating and editing questions), Results Analyser (for dealing with group results) and Server (for delivering tests over intranets and the internet).
History
African American Publications is committed to providing students and adult researchers with accurate, authoritative, and accessible information on a wide variety of ethnic and ethno-religious groups in the United States and Canada. In addition to Americans of African heritage, African American Publications also offers a variety of print reference sets and complementary biographical online resources covering Hispanics, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, Americans of European descent, and notable American men and women. The website includes nearly 1,200 authoritative biographies of notable African American men and women.
Gale Black History: Gale is a business unit of the Thomson Learning division of The Thomson Corporation, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. To celebrate Black History Month it has provided a free resource site. Within this site, teachers and students can read biographies of significant African-American individuals, follow a timeline of events that helped shape African-American heritage and enjoy activities taken from the Black History Month Resource Book.
Sources for Building History: Sources for Building History is Jean Manco's guide to researching historic buildings in the British Isles. It explains how to find related manuscripts, maps and images, while pointing out some of the pitfalls of such sources. Sources for specific building types are given together with information on the type. A section of the website covers ecclesiastical sources. Subject bibliographies include dating, fabric, gazetteers, local history and materials. There are annotated links to relevant archives held by record offices, local libraries, museums, galleries and universities and online catalogues. The site also includes contextual material providing an introduction to town and village development.
Mathematics
Algebra Project: Founded by Civil Rights activist Robert P. Moses in the 1980's, the Algebra Project has developed curricular materials, trained teachers & trainers of teachers, provided ongoing professional development support, and community involvement activities to schools seeking to achieve a systemic change in mathematics education. The Algebra Project builds local networks of students, parents, teachers, administrators, community activists and professionals into policy groups that take responsibility and ownership for implementing the project. The Algebra Project presently serves over 40,000 school students at 22 urban and rural sites in 13 states across the South, the West Coast, the Midwest and the Northeast. In the words of Robert P. Moses:" "The main goal of the Algebra Project is to impact the struggle for citizenship and equality by assisting students in inner city and rural areas to achieve mathematics literacy. Higher order thinking and problem solving skills are necessary for entry into the economic mainstream. Without these skills children will be tracked into an economic underclass."
MathsNet Modules: An online ASA2 mathematics course at MathsNet. This course covers most modules in the current A Level scheme (P1 to P6, S1 to S3 and M1). M2 and M3 are still in development. The course includes over 600 pages of interactive explanations of concepts using a wide range of resources either collected from web sites round the world or home-grown. Included are: interactive displays of graphs, interactive algebra, a glossary of key terms, exam advice, a discussion forum and a unit devoted to background knowledge. There are also over 200 interactive A level examination questions based on recent papers from the various exam boards. Each exam question has a randomized element within it so that in effect each is a limitless supply of similar questions on a specific theme. There are also collections of questions organised into papers complete with online stopwatch.
Science
Interactive Learning Pages: John Ewart is Head of Department in IT in Milford Haven School in South West Wales. He designed this website primarily for teaching Science to less motivated KS4 pupils following a modular Science course. Later he developed the site to include lessons in ICT. The pages of the site follow a common design: a combination of text and graphic information with multiple choice questions or cloze exercises to assess the understanding of the information in the site.
Education Using PowerPoint: This website aims to make high quality education PowerPoint slideshows available to teachers (as a classroom tool) and students (as a revision tool). It features almost complete coverage of the GCSE Science double award course and the GCSE Physic course, including many diagrammatic explanations. Guaranteed to save teachers a lot of time!
Doc Brown's Chemistry Clinic is a non-commercial 'nuts and bolts' constantly evolving and expanding revision web site for chemistry. The material is written by Dr W P Brown, Head of Chemistry, Whitby Community College, England. There is a wide range of revision notes and tests to support any UK based GCSE (USA grades 9-10) syllabus containing chemistry. AS/A2 (USA grades 11-12) revision material includes notes and tests on the Structure of Organic Compounds and sets of volumetric analysis calculations. Some KS3 (USA grades 6-8) material is now available.
Modern Languages
Bonjour: This award-winning website offers a variety of French resources and online activities. Originally set up as a school website, Bonjour is now used in hundreds of schools worldwide. Students can access the site during lesson time as well as at home. Endorsed by the National Curriculum, the NGfL, The Guardian, The BBC, Channel 4 and even the Cabinet Office, Bonjour constitutes a quality resource for all learners and teachers of French. Its downloadable resources include a host of worksheets that complement the online activities.
YourDictionary provides the most comprehensive and authoritative portal for language and language-related products and services on the web with more than 1800 dictionaries covering 250 languages. More than 1,500,000 people a month visit YDC. YourDictionary's immediate predecessor, A Web of Online Dictionaries, was launched in 1995 by Dr. Robert Beard at Bucknell University, as a research tool for the world's linguistic community.
ActiLingua Academy: This website offers visitors not only extensive information on learning German in Vienna, including all there is to know about our wide range of courses, accommodation facilities, and cultural programme, but also sample exercises, a guide to Vienna, travel information and many other interesting topics.
Book Section
Radical Equations: Bob Moses went to Mississippi in 1961, a young man, drawn by the sit-ins. By 1964, his work and others' to organize Black voters in Mississippi had famously transformed the political power of entire communities. Nearly forty years later, Moses is back in Mississippi, organizing again, this time as teacher and founder of the national math literacy program called the Algebra Project. In this book of personal narrative and impassioned argument, Moses brings his civil rights experience to bear on education today. In a technical era when the most pressing civil rights issue is economic access, Moses sees a crisis in math literacy in poor communities as urgent as the crisis of political access in Mississippi in 1961. For Moses, the solution requires - as it did in the 1960s - organizing people, community by community, school by school. (Bob Moses, Beacon Press, £10.00)
