Education on the Internet
Number 70: 14th May, 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 35,570 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
Online Seminars
Essay Writing Skills at AS Level: This week's seminar is led by Carole Faithorn. She has provided some great ideas and strategies for helping the AS candidate to learn how to write “a good essay”. As Carole Faithorn points out, it helps to have a variety of strategies aimed at different learning styles. Strategies suggested include "card sorting activities which involve putting reasons into an order of importance (or ‘Significance Stairway’) help students to visualise relative importance and is effective in helping students to see how to structure an essay effectively." If you have views on writing history essays, register with the History Forum and join the debate.
Education Telegraph: This website, produced by the Daily Telegraph, provides the latest news on educational issues. It also has a bank of lesson plans for Business Studies, Geography, History, Politics and Science. Each lesson plan is based around news and feature articles published by the newspaper. A panel of teachers select the articles and provide questions and activities that can be used in the classroom. Each article comes with a set of useful web links to facilitate further study and research.
European Commission: The eLearning initiative of the European Commission seeks to mobilise the educational and cultural communities, in order to speed up changes in the education and training systems for Europe's move to a knowledge-based society. This initiative has four components: to equip schools with multimedia computers, to train European teachers in digital technologies, to develop European educational services and software and to speed up the networking of schools and teachers.
Web Student Learning: Katrina A. Meyer of the University of North Dakota has carried out a survey of research in web-based learning. Meyer argues that there is evidence that students with "certain learning styles (e.g., visual) or behavioral types (e.g., independent) do learn better in the Web environment. Conversely, aural, dependent and more passive learners may not do as well.... Furthermore, students with a high motivation to learn, greater self-regulating behavior, and the belief they can learn online do better; as do students with the necessary computer skills."
History
Medieval Castles: Step back in time to the vanished world of medieval Britain. Take a virtual tour of 9 castles (Rochester, Hedingham, Caerphilly, Caernarfon, Bodiam, Raglan, Pontefract, Craigievar, Threave), watch video clips, study timelines and get more information. Castle presenter and historian Marc Morris introduces us to 10 of the best-preserved examples across the United Kingdom. Castles were both a fortress and a home. Built to withstand armed assault they also housed elegant ladies, poets, priests, children and animals - as well as brutish warriors.
Watergate Revisited: Richard J. McGowan, was the chief investigator and chief-of-staff of Senator Lowell P. Weicker, an important figure in the Senate Watergate Committee. In this article from the Barnes Review, McGowan argues that the "Nixon Administration flagrantly and systematically violated constitutional rights, subverted the electoral process through illegal fund-raising and campaign sabotage, abused the federal bureaucratic machinery and willfully obstructed justice."
English
Glossarist: Looking for the definition of a term in a particular subject can be difficult and time consuming. Glossarist is a searchable directory of over 6,000 glossaries and topical dictionaries. Catagories include Arts & Culture, Business, Careers & Employment, Computers & Internet, Economy & Finance, Education, Entertainment, Family & Relationships, Government, Politics & Military, Health, Medicine & Fitness, Humanities & Social Sciences, Law and Justice, Lifestyle, Media, News & Weather, Reference, Science, Sports & Recreation, Technology and Transport.
Famous Last Words: In 1927, Nicco Sacco, about to be executed for a crime he did not commit, remarked: "If it had not been for these things I might live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died unmarked, a failure, unknown. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice and for man's understanding of man." Leo Tolstoy, on attempts to persuade him to become a Christian before he died, gasped "Even in the shadow of death, two and two do not make six." Whereas the American Civil War leader, General John Sedgwick, remarked "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance..." This website provides an interesting collection of famous last words, including those of Casanova: "I have Iived as a philosopher and die as a Christian." When it was suggested to Karl Marx that he was dying and should prepare some last words he said angrily: "Get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
Politics
Searchlight: The aim of Searchlight is to combat racism, neo-nazism, fascism and all forms of prejudice. Searchlight has existed for more than 30 years. In summer 1962, in response to a resurgence of open and violent neo-nazi activities, a group of people from a wide variety of political and religious backgrounds met in London to set up the Searchlight Association. Searchlight has appeared as a monthly magazine since 1975. Simon Wiesenthal, the greatest of the post-war nazi-hunters, described Searchlight as the best English language publication of its kind anywhere in the world. The Searchlight archive includes a large collection of articles from past editions of the magazine.
Gulag Online Exhibition: The system of forced labour camps was established in the first years of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union. It became essential part of the Soviet repressive system. The Communist takeovers in the Eastern and Central Europe during the World War II led to mass arrests of non-Communist politicians and people identified as class-enemies. Many of them were sentenced to forced labor camps. In 1952 the International League for the Rights of Man was able to document the existence of more than 400 forced labour camps in Central and Eastern Europe.
Physical Education
Teacher Resource Exchange: This website is designed to help teachers develop and share ideas for activities and resources. Contributions take the form of simple ideas and questions, to complete lesson plans or schemes of work, which will enable other teachers to use these resources within their own lessons. This section covers Physical Education. You can browse and download resources without registering. You will, however, need to register if you would like to submit new resources and add comments or materials to existing resources.
PE Office: This is a useful website for all those involved with physical education and sport in schools. The website provides schemes of work, lesson plans, lesson ideas and extensive links for PE teachers. The Schemes of Work have extensive drills, practices and progressions that are differentiated to aid and assist all abilities.
Internet Services
Info Search Engine: Info.com is a powerful meta-search engine that saves you time by displaying results with one search request from 12 search engines such as Google, About, Ask Jeeves, Teoma and Looksmart. Search engines display results from their own databases - which tend to be fully updated from the World Wide Web about once a month. This means that only a selection of results from the entire Web are available at any one time, and even then many could be out of date. By displaying results taken from 12 different search engines Info.com is far more likely to bring you results that have been more recently updated than by using one search engine alone. Info.com will also include results that some search engines have missed because each one has different criteria for displaying results.
Singlefin: Founded in March of 2001, Singlefin is a leading provider of e-mail protection services. Singlefin offers state of the art services that block spam and viruses as well as protect an organization's entire e-mail infrastructure. The company has a 98% efficiency rate to block spam and 100% when companies opt to utilize their permission based e-mail system. Viruses are blocked at the gateway and junk mail is held offsite as to not affect the client's critical networks.
Book Section
Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader: Although his cousin Sir Francis Drake is more famous, Sir John Hawkins (1532-1592) was a more successful seaman and played a pivotal role in the history of England and the emergence of the global slave trade. Although he committed treason, murder and adultery at various points in his career, he was nonetheless knighted in 1588 for his role in defeating the Spanish Armada. In this impressive book, Harry Kelsey, research scholar at the Huntington Library, tells the story of this extraordinary man. (Harry Kelsey, Yale University Press, ISBN 0 300 09663 1, £25.00)
