I wanted to thank you for an enjoyable session this morning. Your eagerness to learn, your questions, and your patience at sitting for a three hour workshop were appeciated. I hope that the session was of value you to you. Below are some notes from the session and also some links to web sites that I simulated during the workshop. I look forward to working with you again!

-- dave --

Internet
Tools
Demo

Tools: E-mail

Knowing two other science teachers in North Carolina who are avid users of the Internet, I used e-mail to post a message to them asking if they had discovered an valuable resources on the Internet lately related to earthquakes.

I addressed a single message to both teachers by placing both e-mail addresses in the "to:" field seperated by a comma (,).

To: ballan@infoave.com,sally_samuel@aol.com

I then decided to use mailing lists to access information from earthquake experts over the Internet. To do this I pulled up a web page with my browser called "TileNet". The URL is:

http://www.tile.net/tile/

TileNet is an online database of thousands of Internet mailing lists. By typing in the word Earthquake, we were able to find from that database a mailing list called quake-l. The report described how to join the list.

1. address a new e-mail message to the list managing computer -- listserv@list.nodak.edu
2. in the body of the message type the subscribe to list command -- sub quake-l David Warlick

Another use of e-mail was to solicit information from classes over the Internet that are located in earthquake-pron regions. We were able to locate a school in Italy by going to the Web66 web site and to get the e-mail address of a couple of the teachers there. The Web66 site is at:

http://web66.coled.umn.edu/

The Web

I also did an extensive search of the Internet to find other resources on earthquakes. I used a technique called SEARCH. It runs like this:

Start with a small index search tool with a single search term.
Edit the search phrase after examining both the relevant and irrelevant web hits
Advance to a large index search engine such as Alta Vista or Excite
Refine the search phrase after examining hits from the first large index search
Cycle back and advance again -- and again, refining your search expression
Harvest the resources

Internet Style of Learning

Remember that we talked about four unique characteristics of how we use the Internet and ways of leveraging these characteristics. The items are:

Collaboration

1. Small group cooperative techniques in the classroom

2. Small group cooperation over the internet (ThinkQuest)

3. Collaboration through web pages over the Internet (War Eyes)

Self Expression

1. Improved Writing (Riel/Cohen)

2. Authentic Assessment (Eco-Marketing Project)

3. Constructive Learning (ThinkQuest)

Information Resources

1. Moving digital resources from the Internet and into other information processing tools, where teachers and students can add value to that information (Landmarks for Schools)

Interactivity

1. Interactive web sites (Hypertext) -- individualization

2. Personalized outputs via databases

3. Simulations (Water Balloon - Study of Projectiles)