Education on the Internet
Number 82: 6th August, 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 37,500 subscribers to the newsletter.
All reviews are added to our web directory. There are sections on Internet Services, Online Seminars, Primary Education, English, Mathematics, Science, Modern Languages, History, Geography, Design & Technology, Business Studies, Special Needs, Media Studies, ICT, Sociology, Music, Politics, Economics, Photography, Art & Design, Theatre Studies, Physical Education and Religious Studies.
John Simkin
Online Seminars
Teachers or Facilitators: Dafydd Humphreys speculates that "if our esteemed rulers are right - perhaps you don’t need teachers in the classroom - maybe teaching assistants (TAs) could supervise the kids while one teacher per cluster of schools wrote lesson plans and marked work?" He adds: "Those of us left in the education sector could be facilitators - allowing students to follow their own learning pathways along the ready-prepared and prescribed National Curricula (with little tick-boxes for numeracy, literacy, science, ICT, citizenship, personal, social, health and moral education encountered in each lesson). We facilitators would write individual lesson plans for each of the children in the teaching groups, based on computerized tests taken when they were 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 years old."
IJET: The International Journal of Educational Technology (IJET) is an international refereed journal in the field of educational technology, sponsored by faculty, staff, and students at The Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia and the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. IJET is published online twice each year and is available without an access charge. Recent articles include: Extending Learning Opportunities Through a Virtual Faculty - The Videoconference Option, An Analysis of Teacher Concerns Toward Instructional Technology, Online Learning in Schools and Humanities-based Curriculum Online.
Educational Technology & Society is a quarterly journal (January, April, July and October), but the articles are published online as soon as they are ready for publication. Recent topics covered include: Distance Learning Systems, Interactive Learning Environments, Educational Multimedia, Collaborative Learning and Environments, Multimedia Applications, Network-Based Learning Environments, Online Education, Simulations for Learning and Web Based Training.
Electronic School: This award-winning technology magazine for teachers was published from 1987 to 2002 as a print and online supplement to American School Board Journal, in cooperation with ITTE: Education Technology Programs, a program of the National School Boards Association. This site is updated frequently with new education technology resources from American School Board Journal, NSBA's monthly magazine.
History
British History Online is a digital library of British historical sources for historians of Britain located worldwide seeking access to, and cross-searching of, an interconnected range of historical sources including text and information about people, places and businesses from the 12th century to the present day. Built by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament, it aims to provide a particular range and a unique configuration of historical sources whose availability and format will help to devise and develop new research strategies and methodologies.
Histoforum is probably the largest educational history site in the Netherlands. It was started by history teacher Albert van der Kaap five years ago to explore the possibilities of internet in teaching history. Especially the section with ‘Queestes’ (the Dutch equivalent for Webquests) is the result of this exploration. Besides sections that are only of interest for Dutch visitors (partly because the language is Dutch) Histoforum contains sections that may be helpful to English visitors such as ‘teaching materials’, ‘information about and examples of webquests’ and a large section with history links by period, country, alphabet, person and subject.
Science
Virtual Skeletons Project: This project is funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation as part of the interagency Digital Libraries initiative. The purpose of this site is to enable you to view the bones of a human, gorilla, and baboon and to gather information about them from our osteology database. This site provides an interactive environment in which to examine and learn about skeletal anatomy. This includes: high-quality images of bones labels of all muscles, articulations, and morphological features high-resolution 3-D renderings of the skeletal elements in both animation (Quicktime) and interactive virtual reality (VRML) format.
ChemNet: The ChemNet website is a portal and resource site for the UK's email discussion list for chemistry teachers primarily on issues concerning A-level and GCSE teaching. It presently links 400 school chemistry departments. The website is sponsored by Cambridge Software (producers of the industry standard chemical structure software, ChemDraw), and is split into teaching areas, focusing on the use of the Internet and ICT in teaching Chemistry. Thus there are links to Periodic Tables, Chemical Databases and databooks, as well as free software members have recommended. The ChemNet email discussion forum was set up by Keith Wilkinson in 1997 from Winchester College. The forum offers support, ideas, reviews and is a non-profit group run for and by enthusiastic chemistry teachers. ChemNet has also produced downloadable freeware, notably the Solutions Assistant, a calculator written for teachers and technicians to assist compute the mass of compounds needed to make up standard solutions.
Geography
Global Earthquake Response Centre: The Global Earthquake Response Centre provides news on the latest earthquakes. The website also contains an education section. This includes practical advice for schools about what to do if there is an earthquake in your area and resources for those who want to teach about the subject in the classroom. The website also provides links with other 'Earthquake Information Centres' and sites that are concerned with specific earthquakes.
The Volcanic: This website is funded by the Japanese Science and Technology Agency and the National Science Foundation. Regular features include sections on 'Current Eruptions', and 'The Volcanic Photo Gallery'. 'Volcanic Animations' gives the user the opportunity to watch five videos and two computer animations. There are also sections for academics and older students including 'Online Volcanic Journal', 'Volcanic Bibliographic Database' and 'Guide to Volcanologists on the Internet'.
Modern Languages
Online Language Laboratory: If you interested in European languages, lifestyle and culture you should pay a visit to the Eurocosm website. Eurocosm can help language students of all levels - from those who simply want to start learning a foreign language, to those who wish to become multilingual in the 5 most widely-spoken European languages. The Online Language Laboratory has over 500 learning units. The learning modules and units are grouped according to subjects from simply going shopping, meeting friends, answering the phone, expressing your opinion, to finding a job, or even going fishing!
Transparent Language: This website provides this opportunity for you to test your proficiency level in various foreign languages. Transparent Language have based this test on the standard grammar and vocabulary that you would find in any language-learning materials. Unlike achievement tests or other kinds of tests, proficiency tests are not dependent on particular class content, course materials, or language software programs. Instead, a proficiency test is intended to measure your command of a language regardless of your background in that language.
Internet Services
Browser Hijacking: There is a despicable trend that is becoming more and more common where the browser settings of web surfers are being forcibly hijacked by malicious web sites and software which modifies your default start and search pages. Sometimes Internet shortcuts will be added to your favorites folder without asking you. The purpose of this is force you to visit a web site of the hijacker's choice so that they can artificially inflate their web site's traffic for higher advertising revenues. In some cases, these changes are reversible simply by going into Internet options and switching them back. Not always however. Sometimes it's necessary to edit the windows registry to undo the changes made. Sometimes there is even a combination of registry setting and files clandestinely placed on your hard drive that redo your settings every time you reboot the computer. No matter how often you change your settings back, they are changed again the next time you restart. This website will tell you how to solve the problem.
Dutch Lottery Scam: The emails arrive with the subject line "Our Lucky Winner!!!" or similar and purport to be from a Dutch Lottery on which you have won a substantial prize. The email may give you a reference number to quote and a phone number to call, the supposedly unique reference number is in fact often identical in every email sent! Research done on this suggests that the perpetrators are the same people who carry out the "Nigerian" 419 fraud and that you will be asked for your bank account details and/or an advance fee to facilitate the transfer. Either way you are likely to be ripped off.
Book Section
The Zanzibar Chest: After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, terror and genocide prevailed. In Somalia, three of Aidan Hartley's close friends were torn to pieces by an angry mob. Then, after walking overland from Uganda with the rebel army, he saw the terrible atrocities in Rwanda, arriving at the sites and interviewing survivors just days after the massacres. Finally, burnt out from a decade of horror, he retreated to his family's house in Kenya, where he discovered the Zanzibar chest his father left him. The chest contained the diaries of his father's best friend, Peter Davy, an Englishman who died under mysterious circumstances more than 50 years earlier. Aidan Hartley now embarked on a journey to southern Arabia in an effort not only to unlock the secrets of Davy's life, but of his own. (Aidan Hartley, HarperCollins, ISBN 0 00 257059 9, £20.00)
