Education on the Internet
Number 55: 29th January, 2003
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 31,930 subscribers to the newsletter.
All reviews are added to our web directory. There are sections on Internet Services, 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
Professional Development: The DfES is supporting continuing professional development (CPD) by offering £500 to help teachers keep their skills and subject knowledge up to date. How you spend it is up to you: classroom observation, course fees, work shadowing, visiting other schools, travel to key sites, funding supply cover while you pursue your development activity. You can claim the bursary in both your fourth and fifth years of teaching and spend it on any work-related development opportunity.
Comenius: Comenius School Projects are joint, cross-curricular initiatives set up between at least three schools or colleges across at least three countries. They give pupils, students and staff the chance to work directly with those in other countries on topics of common interest. The projects focus on the joint work carried out in the classroom between the different sets of pupils and students. Information and Communication Technology often plays a key role in the projects and can be an ideal means of developing and exchanging work and materials as well as maintaining the momentum and personal contacts of the collaboration. Comenius School Projects are not about creating extra work in an already packed curriculum, but rather taking work which is already happening in the curriculum and placing it in the context of a European project. Successful applicants receive a standard grant of up to €2000 for a co-ordinating school and up to €1500 for a partner school. This is to cover the general costs of being involved in the project. An additional grant is available on top of this to contribute towards mobility costs within the project. This enables between four and six teachers and between two and four pupils to attend planning or evaluation meetings during each year of the project.
Research Scholarship Programme: Each year 1000 scholarships at up to £2,500 each are available to serving classroom teachers to engage in supported, school focussed research. The scholarships enable teachers to develop their professional knowledge, understanding and confidence and to enhance their professional practice. They will also enable and encourage the sharing of effective practice and professional knowledge within the teacher’s school and across the wider educational community. The application period for this year runs from 6 January 2003 to 28 February 2003. The scholarships will be available to teachers from September 2003 enabling them to complete their research in the academic year 2003/4.
History
SchoolHistory Games: The games section of SchoolHistory offers a great way for teachers to help students test their knowledge and understanding without even realising it. Answer ten questions correctly to force a teacher to walk the plank, get questions correct to try and beat a famous goalkeeper, get fifteen questions correct in a row to fling your teacher away. All these games have recently been improved and developed so it is now even easier to use knowledge to try and shoot fairground ducks or guess historical terminology to save Henry VIII from being hanged. Every game has the facility to create your own.
Old Operating Theatre Museum: The Operating Theatre was built in 1822 in the old Herb Garret of St Thomas's Hospital. While the Garret has a charming old world atmosphere of oak beams and bundles of herbs, the Theatre itself is a shocking reminder of the harsh reality of life before modern science and technology. Britain's oldest surviving Operating Theatre has been restored with much original furniture, including a 19th Century operating table. This is an innovative site that gives you a 360 Panoramic Tour of the Operating Theatre and the Herb Garret.
English
Stufun: Studies need not be boring. It can be interesting and students can enjoy learning. This is the motto of Stufun. The first phase of Stufun included definitions of the grammatical terms, questions in pictorial forms, quizzes and exercises which would encourage students to think. To make it more interesting, it has introduced eight cartoon characters who are a part of the Stufun family. The second phase of Stufun includes Gictionary (Online Picture Dictionary), Similar Sounding Words and Interactive Exercises.
Guide to Grammar and Style: A collection of articles on grammar and style by Jack Lynch. The entries are of two types: specific articles on usage, and more general articles on style. The specific articles cover such mechanical things as when to use a semicolon and what a dangling participle is; the general articles discuss ways to make "proper" writing even better. The specific articles can be further divided into two classes: (1) grammatical rules and matters of house style, matters rather of precedent than of taste; and (2) more subjective suggestions for making your writing clearer, more forceful, and more graceful. The specific articles are intended for quick reference, such as when you have to find out whether which or that is appropriate.
Science
School Science: This website has been produced by Industry Supports Education (ISE). ISE was founded in the late 1980s and has produced printed publications for schools since then. The aim is to provide information about the science learnt in schools and how it is applied in industry and research. All the resources are written by experienced teacher authors. All the electronic resources have a similar layout and work in the same way. They include an interactive glossary, interactive diagrams with roll overs, some quick questions and a find facility.
David Peat: This is the personal web site of the writer and physicist Dr. F. David Peat. It contains a large number of essays on physics, Jungian psychology, art, economics, creativity, the ideas of David Bohm, the world view of Native America and Gentle Action. The site also contains transcripts of interviews with scientists, artists and composers such as Sir Michael Tippett and Anthony Gormley, along with some sound clips.
Art
Artist Toolkit: Artists use visual elements and principles like line, colour and shape as tools to build works of art. On this imaginative website you can learn about these concepts in a variety of ways. This includes watching animated movies demonstrating the elements and principles. You can also watch professional artists Ta-Coumba Aiken and Judy Onofrio create original compositions to see how artists use the visual elements and principles.
Art Educate: Educate's art section complements the QCA Primary Schemes for Work for Art. A full unit of work is provided: weekly lesson plans, worksheets, interactive resources and assessment. Topics include printing patterns, collecting natural lines, drawing around shapes, experimenting with textures by making clay tiles, imaginative painting, looking at textures, looking at colour and simple paper collage.
Web Services
Hoaxbusters: Interspersed among the junk mail and spam that fills our Internet e-mail boxes are dire warnings about devastating new viruses, Trojans that eat the heart out of your system, and malicious software that can steal the computer right off your desk. Added to that are messages about free money, children in trouble, and other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone you know. Most all of these messages are hoaxes or chain letters. While hoaxes do not automatically infect systems like a virus or Trojan, they are still time consuming and costly to remove from all the systems where they exist. At CIAC, we find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus and Trojan incidents. These pages describe some of the warnings, offers, and pleas for help that are filling our mailboxes, clogging our mailservers, and that generally do not have any basis in fact.
Purportal: Internet hoaxes and chain letters are e-mail messages written with one purpose; to be sent to everyone you know. The messages they contain are usually untrue. A few of the sympathy messages do describe a real situation but that situation was resolved years ago so the message is not valid and has not been valid for many years. Hoax messages try to get you to pass them on to everyone you know using several different methods of social engineering. Most of the hoax messages play on your need to help other people. Who wouldn't want to warn their friends about some terrible virus that is destroying people's systems? Or, how could you not want to help this poor little girl who is about to die from cancer? This website enables you to check whether a message is a hoax or not.
Advertising
Times Literary Supplement: Subscribe online today and enjoy a reduced subscription rate, free access to the TLS Subscriber Archive. Subscribers can search every issue of the paper back to October 1994.
Scholarship Experts: Fill out the form on the website and with some basic information about yourself to see how many current scholarships you are potentially eligible for. Once the nine-step profile is complete, you can see how many scholarships match your profile and then decide whether or not to subscribe to the time-saving Scholarship Experts service.
Teacher Created Materials: Teacher Created Materials is an educational publishing company founded in 1982 by Rachelle Cracchiolo and Mary Dupuy Smith, two classroom teachers. All the products available on the website are "created by teachers for teachers and parents." You can search by item number, title, keyword, topic, subject area, or age/grade.
