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Web Hunts
1-8-99: Judy Isaksen of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, eases her students
into using the World Wide Web by using a progressively more demanding series of tasks.
- Provide a URL or link and have students find information on the website's first page.
- Provide a URL or link, but ask questions that will cause students to move inside a site
rather than simply scroll one page.
- Train students to use search engines [at least one like Infoseek and one with Boolean search ability, such as Hotbot].
- Advance to searches for which you don't supply the URLs or links but just terms.
 | Start with a term you know will yield good "hits" in the prescribed search
engine. |
| Graduate to terms that you have not personally pre-searched. |
| Encourage students to try meta-search engines, e.g. Dogpile,
or the somewhat more
multimedia ixquick.com, which
finds very relevant web pages, photos, mp3 music
files, very quickly via a dozen different search engines.
When I used both of these,
plus Look Smart, to help find links for a web
in summer, 2001, ixquick was fastest and
found better websites and photos. (Thanks to Jessica Stephan
of Ixquick for the tip.) |
Source: "What Works for Me: World Wide Web Research Assignments." Teaching
English in the Two-Year College. 26.2 [Dec.] 1998:196-197. |
Technology Grants
1-14-99: Here are a few grants that were funded for K-12; that doesn't mean we can't
adapt the ideas. (The funder was The AOL Foundation; each grant was up to $7,500 for
"innovative uses of technology.")
 | "Widening Our World Through Cyberspace":Students and parents are assembling a
"schoolyard map" by searching for information on specified countries, states,
and school websites. Students complete a portfolio of their searches. [For what set
of information might your students search, dividing up subsets of topics to search for
individually or in teams?] |
| "Living History Project": Students will interview family members and people in
the community who lived through the Civil Rights Movement about their experiences.
They will use the information to create a multimedia component of the school district's
website. [What milestone change in your field might your students research by talking to
practitioners in your field who lived through it?] |
| "Virtual Mentor": At-risk students are paired with "high-tech business
leaders" who use the Web, email, and videoconferencing to lead students through
projects designed to get them to see the real world through experts' eyes. [At what point
in your program do students make contact with area employers to get a reality check on
what specific job entail in your discipline? Assignment: Interview 3 workers whose
jobs you might like to have someday, or need to know about as a supervisor. One should be
a frontline worker, another should be from middle management, and the third should be from
upper management, preferably from the same company or organization.] |
| "Picture Books": ESL students with sufficient English skills assemble and
caption picture books for children to be published online in English and in the student's
native language so that children across the globe can access them. [What concepts in your
field might your students illustrate? Could they write captions for these illustrations
clearly enough for younger students to understand? Do you have contacts (or might
you be willing to make contacts) in a school who might want your students' illustrations
or want to view them online--and perhaps give feedback? For more information, an
actual assignment, and a sample, ask me about
my Nevada Project and Florida Project: ehibbison@jsr.cc.va.us ] |
Source: "AOL Gives Funding to 54 K-12 Schools." T.H.E. Journal 26.5
[Dec.] 1998: 16-25. |
Exceptional Products for Exceptional People
Michael Phillips edits and writes for his high school newspaper, maintains
high grades, maintains an Internet column called "Palpatine's Mac World."
He has won a Florida scholarship to any public college, in addition to being a
photographer, computer gamer, and diligent Net surfer who has made illustrations and his
own Web page. Why is this so exceptional? Michael has SMA--spinal muscular
atrophy. He basically controls his computer with his thumb, aided by assistive
technology called Discover: Kenx, a sensitive filament that acts as a sort of super-mouse
made by the Don Johnston company in Wauconda, Illinois.
Source: "Applications: Assistive Technology Helps Students Overcome
Physical Limitations." T.H.E. Journal 26.5 [Dec.] 1998:43. |
A Web Course on Learning from the Web
Click here to preview
this 2-credit, graduate-level semester course taught under the Psychology Department at
Western Kentucky University.
Thanks to Sue Coffey and Bernadette Black for the reference. |
Research and Recommendations About Online Teaching:
Site Design Options
2-4-99: Click here to read a couple of pages from the Final
Report of the ENG 112 Courseware Project, which developed a library of resources that
could be used to teach any ENG 112 section in the VCCS. The site currently supports
the offering of 5 online sections at four colleges and occasional use by on-campus
sections.
Visit the Litonline site. |
Websites for Statistics
2-5-99: Prof. Stephen Pollard of California State University in Los
Angeles offers these sites for business
and economics statistics online including free software downloads, data sets, case
studies, other collections of statistics websites, and the home page of the Journal of
Statistics Education. |
HAPS
2-11-99: The Human Anatomy and Physiology
Society maintains a website and a listserv. The Website features a list of PowerPoint
presentations and another list of interactive software for teaching undergraduate Anatomy
and Physiology.
The HAPS listserv focuses on teaching of anatomy and physiology and
teaching issues, including online teaching. To subscribe to this email feature, send
e-mail to
HAPP-L-request@scimath.imperial.cc.ca.us
In the BODY of the message at the beginning of the first line put ONLY the
single word SUBSCRIBE. The listserv software reads your email address from your
email From line. It is customary (necessary?) to leave the "Subject" line
blank. Also, be sure that no signature is sent as part of your email subscription message.
Thanks to Barbara Stewart (JSRCC) for pointing me to this website. |
Engineering Education
2-17-99: The Test and
Measurements Educators Corner is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard. The site includes a
library of experiments for engineering educators to download, plus interactive online
versions of some experiments, and a library of sound files of biological and mechanical
phenomena to help train students' ears.
Click on "Experiments," "Teacher's Tools," and "Lab
Equipment" on the menu to the right of the picture to find many, many resources for
engineering education. |
Mad Scientist Network
2-18-99: Ask a question on any scientific topic
from agriculture to zoology and it will be taken up by one of a team of scientists, who
may check with other experts to find an answer. |
2-19-99: Where can you find a picture of a bovine pulmonary artery endothelial
cell? At Cells Alive, of course! You
can use up to 3 images offline free with the proper credit line, and you can link from
your website to Cells Alive (as above--click that animated logo).
The site includes photos of things microscopic, sometimes with false color to highlight
certain features. Cells Alive includes a gallery (archive), including an archive of
the site's striking cover photos, and a branch site called "Crystals Alive." |
Conference Online from Hawaii
2-22-99: Can your college process a conference registration for you
without a travel request? Here's your chance to find out. For $25 (before March 17;
$35 after that), you can register for the April
7 - 9 online conference "Best Practices in Delivering, Supporting, &
Managing Online Learning," the 4th annual TEACHING IN THE COMMUNITY COLLEGES
ONLINE CONFERENCE, hosted by Kapi'olani CC. To attend synchronously, follow the
schedule you receive and click the links involved. Online forums and email
connections to presenters are part of the planned follow-up to each session. To
participate fully in synchronous online sessions, study the FAQs on the site linked above
to learn how to use a MOO--then you can type questions and see an ongoing discussion
during the session time.
If you miss the sessions, use the link above to connect to the 1999
conference papers. In 1998, over 100 papers were posted (and they are still
there) from threads such as "science online," "writing instruction,"
"course development," "math and statistics," "faculty
training," "ESL," "literature and art," "business
education," "social sciences and education," "instructional
issues," and "nursing and health." |
Teaching on the Web
2-23-99: Maricopa Community College maintains a prescreened, searchable library of
course and lesson samples. As of 2/20/99, there were 673 samples in all sorts of disciplines.
You can pick the discipline to search and see all samples listed or be more specific.
The list links you to lessons and courses, not solicitations, databases, or
resources. For instance, Jim Burns of Mountain Empire CC has his online ENG 111 course
linked and described at this site.
Hint: Delete the /tl from the right end of the URL and see what other
resources you can find at the Maricopa CC Teaching and Learning Center website.
(FYI: If you want to submit your course, don't use Internet Explorer
4.x but
use Netscape 4.x instead. IE didn't handle the connection when I submitted Litonline, but
Netscape did.)
Thanks to Charlie Peterson, JSRCC Continuing Education, for this lead. |
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1999