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Presentation for Inservice

We all have stories about using technology in our classrooms. Some of our stories are about how technology was successful while other stories tell tragedies of unsuccess. Mr. Sarff’s peril began innocuously enough. He taught fourth graders and his school had spent thousands of dollars on the hardware and wiring necessary for the internet to be installed. Mr. Sarff had listened to his class beg to go on-line long enough. He gave in to their wishes. The class was planning a trip to Washington, D.C. and he would allow them to do research in preparation for the visit. Unfortunately, Mr. Sarff was like many teachers. He had had very little free time in the last few weeks and had not done any preparation ahead of time. BIG MISTAKE. Mr. Sarff’s students knew much more than he did and were surfing the Web with tools he had never heard of. Many students were cutting and pasting information from the Web directly into their “original” reports. Mr. Sarff was unsure how the activity had spun out of control so quickly. He put a quick stop to things and re-evaluated when a typo caused a pornographic site to appear. Using the internet in the classroom is not something meant to scare you. It has the potential to inform, teach and facilitate communication in ways that were barely even imaginable when I was in school. Because the web is so immense it can be difficult to master. Many times it may seem more trouble than it’s worth. The good news is that today I am going to share with you some ways to develop your on-line “smarts” so that you will be in charge and use the Web in your classrooms.

My intent is to make this most useful to you and so I am going to tell you quickly about the following things:
*Browsers
*Search Engines
*E-mail
*On-line Chatting
*Listservs
*Web page design
As I go I am going to give you many opportunities to try different things. One thing that I will assume before we begin is that you can already use the pull-down menus, minimize, restore, and resize you application window, and use the scroll bars. If I go too quickly and you would like me to slow down let me know. Much of this is in the handout to help you.

BROWSERS
Our web browsers operate using GUI’s. These are graphical user interfaces. It makes it possible to click on pictures or icons and make something happen. For example, the picture of the printer lets us point and click on a picture to print. Although the order and appearance of some of the icons are different in the various browsers we can easily navigate any browser if we have knowledge of one browser. The 2 most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Before we had the browsers of today a young man named Mark Andreessen created the program for the first well-known browser called Mosaic. The first browser allowed pictures to be seen and different sites on the Internet to be linked using hypertext. Parting of getting the most out of the internet is knowing how to use the tools at your disposal.
Probably the most important part of the browser window, besides the application window itself, is the Address or Location box. This is the place where you enter the Uniform Resource Locator(URL). The URL is the way the internet addresses sites and is used as the initial access to a resource.
Think about the address where you live. What information does the different parts of your home address supply? What can we tell from a URL for a web site?

The toolbar gives you one-click access to the tools you will use the most.
Besides the toolbar we can visit pages from before by using the history folder.
If we find a site that we would like to use again or revisit be can add it to favorites or bookmark it. This makes the computer keep track of your URL’s so you don’t have to.
Once you have accumulated many favorites it is nice to organize those favorites so that they are in folders according to content.
Becoming comfortable with the browser you will use will allow you be quickly on your way to web “smarts”.

SEARCH ENGINES

Making searches more effective can be done very simply using the Boolean method and knowing how your search engines work.
Let's try this activity: We want to find out about Ford Escorts.

Be specific in choosing words
Use AND, OR, and NOT
Use lower case escept in Boolean phrases
Try different search engines
Put keywords in quotes and add the other words with plus signs.

E-mail
Everyone can have an email account. I have found that the free web-based email accounts work easily for classroom purposes.
    hotmail
    yahoo
    email
Once you have email you have opportunities to belong to newsgroups and listservs. You can send messages across the room or across the country.
    address books
    signatures
    attachments
    folders
Show me an example of what a message I would send to a class should look like if I want them to complete an assignment on line.

We expect other drivers to observe the rules of the road and the same is true as we travel through cyberspace. You can use these with email messages as well as when you are chatting. Here are a few pointers to help you out:
Avoid using all caps.
IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE SHOUTING!
To personalize your messages, you can use smileys, also known as emoticons, expressions you create from the characters on your keyboard. A few popular ones include:
:-) Happy
:-e Disappointed
:-( Sad
:-< Mad
:-o Surprised
:-D Laughing
:-@ Screaming
;-) Winking
:-I Indifferent
Keep your communications to the point.

To keep messages short, there are some abbreviations you can use:
<BTW> means "by the way."
A <G> enclosed in brackets indicates grinning.
A good one to keep handy in case you're worried about offending someone is <IMHO> -- In My Humble Opinion.
One of our favorites is <ROTFL>, which stands for Rolling on the Floor Laughing.

Chat vs. Email
Often can find an "expert" through educational sites so that students can chat in real time.
ICQ
MSN Messenger
AOL Instant Messenger
Yahoo

Web Page Design
A web page is an electronic document written in a computer language called HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language. Each web page has a unique address, called a URL, short for Uniform Resource Locator, which identifies its location on the network.
A website has one or more related web pages, depending on how it's designed. Web pages on a website are linked together through a system of hyperlinks, so that you can jump between them by clicking on a link. On the Web, you navigate, popularly knowing as surfing, through pages of information based on what interests you at that particular moment.
Home Sweet Home Page
When you browse the World Wide Web you'll see the term home page quite a lot. Think of a home page as the starting point of a website. Like the table of contents of a book or magazine, the home page in most cases gives an overview of what you'll find at the website. A website can have one page, many pages or a few long ones, depending on how it's designed. If there isn't a lot of information, the home page may be the only page. But usually you will find at least a few other pages.
Web pages vary wildly in their design and content, but most use a traditional magazine format. At the top of the page is a masthead or banner graphic. Then there's a list of items, such as articles, often with a brief description. The items in the list are usually hot, meaning that they are linked to other pages in the website or to other websites. Sometimes these links are highlighted words in the body of the text or are arranged in a list, just like an index. They can also be a combination of both. A web page can also have images that link to other content.