Education on the Internet
Number 98: 26th November, 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 41,600 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
Hot-seating: Whilst all teachers would like to think that their classes hang onto their every word with grateful awe and rapture, students will actually get rather bored hearing the same voice wittering on at them day in, day out. Russel Tarr argues that hot-seating and role-plays allow teachers and students to use and hear different voices. Not only that, but bringing historical characters to life to answer questions about their lives, beliefs and achievements is a great way of imparting knowledge, understanding and issues of interpretation. If you have views on this subject, register with the History Forum and join the debate.
News and Articles
Teachers' TV: A new television station for teachers will be launched in Britain next year. The station will be funded by the Department for Education and Skills but run by Education Digital, a consortium of a production company, Brook Lapping, Carlton Communications, and the Institute of Education in London. The DfES will set educational objectives, but will have no editorial control. It will broadcast for 18 hours a day on Sky, Freeview and NTL. Some material has already been commissioned. This includes a "changing classrooms" makeover programme and a stand-up comedy competition for teachers.
Seed Project is one of the European Schoolnet's School of Tomorrow Projects. Seed began in universities - but the plan was always to introduce it to schools. Seed is a project that has the aim of "seeding cultural change in the school system through the generation of communities engaged in integrated educational and technological innovation." It is currently running in forty schools in Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Textbooks in Iraq: In 1973 Saddam Hussein ordered that all school history books should be rewritten from the Ba'ath Party perspective. Soon after the United States occupied Iraq they began to search for "educators" who could be trusted. Eventually a team was appointed to rewrite history textbooks for Iraq's 5.5 million school-children. Faud Hussein, an academic who had been living in exile, was brought in and placed in charge of producing revised textbooks. Over the next few weeks he hand-picked 67 teachers to rewrite the textbooks. He admits that the team "considered anything anti-American to be propaganda". It is believed that the first of these new history books will be published next month.
History
World War One: This website includes the causes of the war; major battle fought in the war (Mons, Marne, Gallipoli, Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele, Tannenberg, Cambrai, Caporetto, Jutland); trench warfare; the role of British women in the war; modern weapons used in the war (machine guns, planes, poison gas and gas masks, tanks, artillery etc); conscientious objectors; military figures in the war (Haig, Foch, Joffre, Jellicoe, Petain, Beatty, Falkenhayn); propaganda in the war; Christmas and the war; an A to Z of the war; a timeline of the war and casualty statistic of the war.
Kings and Queens: This Grid Club website provides brief biographies of all British monarchs since William the Conqueror. It also contains overviews of the Normans, Angevins, Plantagenets, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanovers, Saxe-Coburg Gothas and Windsors. These pages include some good coloured illustrations that could be used to explore changes in clothes and fashions over the centuries.
Science
Leonardo da Vinci and his Machines: Leonardo DA Vinci was much more than an artist. He was an astronomer, sculptor, geologist, mathematician, botanist, animal behaviourist, inventor, engineer, architect and even a musician. This excellent website endeavours to introduce you to the scientific visionary and includes sections on Clocks & Cranes, Diving Gear & Water Floats, Flying Machines, Land Vehicles, Printing Press & Parachute, Robot, Lifting Jack, Water Pumps, Armoured Tank, Battleships & Submersibles, Bridges & Ladders, Catapults & Crossbows, Cannons & Machine Guns.
Speculative Science: Notes & Queries began in 1989 as a weekly column in the Guardian, and rapidly acquired a cult following. Now, thanks to the Internet, it is reaching a worldwide electronic audience. The questions and answers are organised into different categories. This section deals with science and includes questions such as: How can I demonstrate the cause of gravity rather than the effect of gravity? What direction does water flow down a plug hole on the equator? If I stood on the exact location of magnetic north, what direction would my compass point? Why are clouds different colours? Why is the sky blue? Can it ever be too cold to snow? Is it greener to burn all our combustable household waste on an open fire or send it to a land fill sight?
Politics
Superpowers and Morality: George Monbiot argues that it is a myth that superpowers make moral decisions concerning foreign policy. Monbiot points out that: "As soon as one argument for the invasion and occupation of Iraq collapses, they switch to another. Over the past month, almost all the warriors - Bush, Blair and the belligerents in both the conservative and the liberal press - have fallen back on the last line of defence, the argument we know as the moral case for war. Monbiot adds: "A superpower does not have moral imperatives. It has strategic imperatives. Its purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain itself. Concern for the rights and feelings of others is an impediment to the pursuit of its objectives. It can make the moral case, but that doesn't mean that it is motivated by the moral case."
Republic: This is the website that broke the recent story on Prince Charles and Michael Fawcett. The Republic organization has grown steadily in size and profile since its formation in 1983, when talk of replacing Britain's monarchy with a democratically elected Head of State was a virtually taboo subject. Mature debate on this subject is now normal, and this to great extent thanks to the untiring efforts of Republic and its supporters in putting forward a reasoned and informed argument against the current system.
Economics
EH Net: This website has been established to provide a wide range of internet-based services to economic historians, historians of economics, economists, historians, related social scientists and the public. These services include an Ask the Professor service, research abstract and book review series, a collection of course syllabi, a directory of economic historians, an Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History, several databases, numerous links to websites related to economic history, and the popular "How Much Is That" services - which allows users to easily look up historical prices, interest rates, wage rates, GDP statistics, exchange rates and inflation rates.
Upstarts Awards: Funded by the New Statesman, the Upstarts Awards exist to promote the best of UK social enterprise and spread the idea of social entrepreneurs as a dynamic force for change. The awards highlight and reward individuals with extraordinary vision and a commitment to social enterprise. There are six awards and more than £20,000 worth of prizes to be won this year. Previous winners include the Eden Project in Cornwall and McSence in Midlothian.
Media Studies
Today's Front Pages is an online version of a popular exhibit at Washington DC's Museum of Virtual News. Every morning, more than 100 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum via the Internet. Front pages are chosen to represent each of the 50 states as well as a selection of international newspapers. The main page of the website is a gallery of thumbnail images of newspaper front pages from around the world. You can click on a thumbnail to read a larger version of that front page. Updated daily it provides an excellent at-a-glance snapshot of global news.
Newsround: This BBC website provides news stories on interest to young people. The three main stories today are Apes are in danger of extinction, Non-green schools waste millions and last night's Champions League games. All news stories appear in categories such as UK News, World News, Sport, Music, TV/Film, Animals, Science and Technology. The website also has a section that explains how the stories gets online.
Internet Services
Schools Website Directory: This directory was first published on the web in 1996 under the SchoolNet UK banner. Later it became part of BT's Campus World website, and then part of Anglia Multimedia's AngliaCampus. Recently the directory has been re-engineered as a web enabled database and all data has been re-verified In the last two months, all 3644 school websites have been visited and catalogued. All English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish state secondary schools which have a website, have now been included in the database. The directory currently contains 5469 UK school websites.
InvisionFree: This website provides free notice boards to individuals, groups, or businesses. InvisionFree installs the board for you. You don't need to use ftp or know how to cope with MySQL. InvisionFree runs on custom server software built to run fast and run stable. InvisionFree is pop-up free and has no plans to ever use pop-up ads. InvisionFree's dedication to providing top notch support and the freedom to create the board you want make InvisionFree an interesting alternative even to paid hosts. Why pay for a service when you can find just as good if not better for free?
Book Section
Red Queen: Barbara Castle was the person most people expected to be Britain's first woman prime minister: the most colourful, the most successful and the most controversial woman in British politics. Drawing on much previously unpublished material, this warm and human portrait of one of the most vivid personalities of the post-war era examines the battles she fought and the weapons she used in what was less of a career than a crusade. Anne Perkins's compelling biography is the inside story of what it was really like for a woman in twentieth-century British politics and public life. (Anne Perkins, Macmillan, ISBN 0 333 90511 3, £20.00)
