The role of Internets for Education

           Email is in essence for mail transmission electronically among people. There are also mailboxes, mail servers and other features like those in traditional post office systems. Only the difference is the simplicity and speed in the information transmission via computer and Internet. E-mail is a great achievement in the world of communication. It is a great achievement because it allows messages reach its recipients within a very short time. If anybody asks how much time it would take for a letter to reach Bangladesh from EU or USA, even the top officials of the Post department would not be able to answer. The fastest mail delivery system of the world, DHL takes a minimum of three days to deliver mail to a client. 

            There are of course other communication devices like phone, fax, telex, but often those are too costly. Among all the media of information transmission, email is the best as it is the cheapest and also the fastest. Also it ensures privacy or secrecy, as the message is stored in the mailbox of the recipient directly. The sender can be sure that the recipient will obtain the message, which is sometimes impossible to assume in case of Fax. Another great benefit of email is that a user can access his/her messages from any computer of the world that has Internet access, whenever he/she wants to check for e-mail. Every email recipient must have an email address to be identified and to temporarily store the message in the mail server. If there is no address, how you will be able to locate any person among millions of people. You must have an address, and so email is sent to addresses. Example: alam@bangla.net is an email address. Every address must be specified according to the mail server. The unique name before the @ sign would give the identification of the recipient. Here Alma is the user or recipient and bangla.net is the mail server.

By now, everyone has heard of the great educational benefit of the Internet. In fact, as part of our work for any University, we can use the Internet as an integral part of various educational programs at all levels. In this connection, we will be conversant with some questions about education on the Internet which need to be answered: How can we search out in touch with other teachers through the Internet? What are some explicit K-12 wherewithal on the Internet? What are some resources available for higher education institute? Can we give us some examples of how one would find research and other academic information on the Internet? We at first are going to learn how we might connect with some other educators. From there, we will look at some resources geared specifically toward higher education professionals virtually. Assuming that Sabah is an elementary mathematics and special education teacher of Sunbeam School Dhaka. She is interested in distance education, math, and special education. If our hypothetical teacher wants to get in touch with other teachers and resources, what would she do? That's what we will find out. Just a Minute: We might note that there is a pretty heavy emphasis on glisters in this topic. Unfortunately, many K-12 teachers out there have very limited Internet access and often don't have access to the latest technology and computers. The K-12 resources you will see in this lesson try to take these factors into account. A vast number of K-12 teachers take advantage of the hundreds of educational glisters that are out there. They can locate glisters on many topics and can contact professionals and experts in their fields with the click of a mouse. Shilla is no different. She has decided that she would like to start off subscribing to three such glisters to see what will happen. First, she is interested in distance education, so he would like to see if there are any glisters out there to help him. When she types in distance education in the search field at Catalysts, he sees that there are indeed some glisters in which he's interested. Just a Minute: Pay attention to how many subscribers there are on these glisters. Lists with a lot of subscribers will have a lot of information but might be hard to keep current with all the mail they generate. Lists with a low number of subscribers might be easy to keep up with but might have little traffic. After reading the information on how to subscribe to that list, she returns to the search page to search for a mathematics listserv. Because she doesn't really know where to begin, he searches for math, mathematics so that Catalyst will find any listserv with either of these words in the title. He is rewarded with 64 matches

K-12 News

               There are other places Sabah can go on the Internet to find other people who are interested in the same topics as he. After he starts WinVN, his newsreader, and brings up a list of all the newsgroups his news server carries, he is ready to find some relevant newsgroup. Maybe you'd like to find some newsgroups you are interested in, too. Time Saver: Unlike Catalyst searches for listservs, newsgroups won't have full "English" names. For example, don't look for a special education newsgroup. Instead, try special, education. Special, or even sped or speced. Be creative in your search terms to find a newsgroup that's right for you.

1. by choosing Group Find or clicking the Search toolbar button, search for distance. You will notice that WinVN locates the alt.education.distance newsgroup

2. With the group highlighted, choose Group Subscribe Selected Groups.

3. Repeat the first two steps by conducting a search for math. Choose Group Find Next (or press the F3 key) until you locate k12.ed.math.

4. Repeat the first two steps again, this time looking for special. If you repeat the search several times, you will find the group k12.ed.special. We might notice that a few of the newsgroups you found were in the k12.* hierarchy. You might want to spend some time perusing the groups there. If you are a K-12 educator, you are sure to find a group that interests you. Also, if you are interested in what educators in other countries are doing in education, just keep searching your newsgroups and you'll come in contact with educators all over the world. If you continue your search for math, you will find math-related newsgroups in Canada, Germany, Taiwan, and other locales. Just a Minute: Although this section has focused on K-12 education, there are plenty of glisters and newsgroups available for those in post-secondary education as well. You can use the techniques learned in this section to search for just about any listserv or newsgroup.

K-12 on the Internet

              It should be noted right away that, in essence, there really is little difference between finding educational resources and finding any other information on the Internet. World Wide Web and Gopher search engines are useful, as are many of the libraries and files available through Telnet and FTP. We should not hesitate to use the same resources you would use for other purposes when you are looking for information on education. For example, an Excite search for k-12 +education produced over two million hits! The Internet is particularly useful to educators for many reasons, and you're going to look at these other resources in a little more detail now. One of the most exciting projects I ever worked on was a science project that was completed by two elementary schools in Michigan and Texas. For our project, the two schools took samples from nearby rivers and compared them. They took careful notes on indigenous vegetation, weather patterns, and other factors, all of which were gathered over the Internet. They then used the Internet to compare their results and compose a final project. The power of collaboration like this can't be denied, but how would you start? One of the first sites to look at would be the listing of K-12 Web servers located at The Texas Education Network (TENET). For example, suppose you are looking for an elementary school in Michigan with which to do a collaborative project.

1. From the state-by-state listing, click Michigan.

2. Next, click the School Districts link.

3. Now click Ingham Intermediate School District.

4. From there, click Ingham County Schools. You then could proceed to any school you like.

5. To finish the exercise, click Lansing.

6. Finally, scroll down and click Home Pages. After you do, you can e-mail or contact many staff and teachers in the Lansing School District.

Of course, you could click any state and follow many links to other schools and teachers throughout the nation. You might find that you can forge some lasting educational relationships with the help of the Internet.

The Computer without the Internet

As shocking as it might seem, some teachers might want to use their classroom computers for reasons other than accessing the Internet. Many teachers want to make use of educational software. Although there is a lot of commercial software out there, it often is too expensive for teachers and school districts to purchase. However, the Internet offers a wealth of educational software for all K-12 levels. But how do you find it? We could go to http://www.shareware.com, and we'd probably eventually find quite a bit. However, Ziff-Davis already has compiled over 10,000 shareware titles for you in ZD Net Software Library, located at http://www.hotfiles.com/educate.html. Find Some Chemistry Software

Click the High School and College link to find higher-level programs.

Let us notice that there are two pages of high school and college shareware programs from which to choose. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Next link.

Scroll down on the next page until you find the four-star-rated Periodic Table of the Elements (Cyber) v.2.1. Click its link.

You'll be taken to an information page on the Periodic Table software. From here, you can simply click the Download button to put the software on your computer.

In addition to this piece of software, there were almost a dozen other chemistry and high school science programs available at this site. If you simply cannot find something for which you're looking, you can always conduct a search of the site. There are many other ways in which you can use the Internet in your classroom. Collaboration and educational software use are just two of them. Feel free to explore some more on your own to discover even more uses. The amount of higher education material out there is staggering. Literally hundreds of universities now are on the Web, giving users access to libraries, research, and other resources that only universities can offer. When searching for anything, it's good to have a jumping-off point from which you can find your way to any university you want. This "jumping-off" place for higher education resources has got to be http://web.mit.edu/cdemello/www/geog.html. This page lists over 3,000 universities worldwide. If we are interested in only U.S. universities, we need to click the United States link to go to http:// www.clas.ufl.edu/CLAS/american-universities.html. This page will take you to Web sites for hundreds of universities from Abilene Christian to Youngstown State. Just A Minute: If community colleges are more our speed, check out http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cgi-bin/search.html. It has over 500 community colleges from which to choose. Knowing how to get to other universities and their resources is valuable, of course, but it's research that really drives higher education. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could use the Internet to conduct some of that research? Well, you can. Many journals and other research sources are already online, and more are joining them every day. Suppose you were a professor interested in 19th-century literature doing research on Edgar Allan Poe; where would you go? An outstanding starting point would be the Washington and Lee University's Libraries and Research Web page at http://liberty.uc.wlu.edu/~dgrefe/various/libres.html. You would see jumping-off points for a variety of different research resources. Although the second section of this page says that the listed resources are for Washington and Lee departments, these resources are generally available for anyone interested in the related topics. We will note that there is a section on the Arts and Humanities; you'll return to them later.

First, we might want to try your hand at some of the general resources.

To Do: Look for Some Periodical Information

1. Click the Periodical Indexes link.

2. Go to Uncover. By the way, you might want to spend some time exploring Uncover more in-depth on your own time. It is an excellent resource in and of itself.

3. Scroll down and click Search the Uncover Databases.

4. Next, click Search Uncover Now.

5. From the search page, type Poe on line 2 and press Enter.

6. At the time of this search, there were 151 articles something wherein we found one article titled "The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself," published in the fall 1996 American Literary History periodical. If we go back to the Libraries and Research page, you might want to explore a few of the other general resources available. In particular to our topic, following these paths will take you to even more information: Before you're finished at Washington and Lee, take a look at one of the departmental links available.

Linking Up with the Department

1. Click Arts and Humanities.

2. Next, click English and then select the Literary Resources and Guides option.

3. Now choose Literary Resources on the Net, and click the US category on the resulting page.

4. The next page shows a large number of links all related to American Literary resources. Scroll down and click Nineteenth-Century, and on the next page, find the 19th-Century link and click it.

5. Finally, scroll down the page until you find the entire section dedicated to the person.

Before you go on, it is important to remember once again that, even though you chose to explore a 19th-century American author, you could have just as easily searched for information on modern quantum mechanics theory or the latest writings on supply-side financial side. The topic really is irrelevant; the process is not.

For K-12 teachers:

Using the methods we may learn a lot in these phenomena to find at least one listserv and one newsgroup related to what we teach. Using a project that we can use for classes, see if we can turn it into a collaborative project and locate a school or teacher to share it with. Pick a topic on which we currently need information and, using the techniques and sites we learned about in this lesson, find at least five resources on the Internet to help us. Email works like a postal system. When someone mails a message (letter), first it is stored in a mail server. This is just like posting the letters in the local post office or letterbox. Mail servers are the storage points like the postal department’s post offices, which act as temporary storage during transfer of letters from sender to receiver. In case of electronic mail, mail servers serve as the sender’s post office; the e-mails are then forwarded to numerous other mail servers before it reaches the recipient’s mail server. The sender’s mail server also plays important role in controlling data traffic. When in any network junction there are jams, then server stores some messages and sends the messages after the network gets free. In this way it protects the traffic jams in the message paths. Besides, there is a different email system, which acts as gateways or translators among POP3 or X.400.

When the message reaches the destination mail-server, it is stored there until the recipient checks for it and receives it.

               Internet is physically possible to interconnect millions of computers through satellite system and using telephone lines creating a large network. Direct cable connection is an alternative to satellite connection among LANs. Basically Internet is the network of numerous worldwide networks. A server called Internet Server also known as ISP (Internet Service Provider) plays the role of the server computer. If someone has an account or user permission he/she can enter into his/her ISP’s Internet Server, through which he/she can access any Internet Server in the world. Any person can browse through any information from millions of computers after he/she enters an Internet server. For this reason, Internet is a great wonder of modern science, the so-called information super highway. A web-site is a hard disk space in one of the billions of computers in the Internet. A certain web-site will have information on a specific topic. For example Education, Sports, Shopping, Business or any other topic will have several web-sites dedicated to those topics. We can get the news from web-sites of CNN or BBC. A web-site is identified on the Internet by a unique address.

There is versatile usage of the Internet. It is not only the source of huge information, but also a very powerful media to establish direct and easy communication among people and societies. There are the following special features:

• The Information Superhighway

• The World Wide Web

• Bulletin Boards

• Chat forums

• E-mail

• Information Retrieval etc.

The Internet is the super corridor or super highway where any sort of information can be published, retrieved or exchanged. Every Internet Server stores a large number of information on different topics. And there are millions of such servers, which are active all day long, even days or months together. There is no break, no pause. So information is available any time, any moment. You may just hook with Internet and get the piles of information! The WWW is a very famous term, used to define the information population by any Internet server. It is basically a worldwide publication of the web pages to demonstrate peoples, societies and organisations. Every web page is technically a page of information, where different connecting heads/subheads are available to go through next pages of related information, which are bundled together. Bulletin Boards are actually simple forums where news, software, games, articles are bundled together with access to every member where they can directly contribute to or collect from the system, according to everybody’s requirement. In a bulletin board, you may have the opportunity of conferencing with others, sending items without worrying whom you want to communicate with. Every member may have same freedom to collect anything at any time, according to his/her own convenience. Chat forums are basically forums of people to make some grouping to create small conference among them. However there may not be different types of items other than chatting or just news.

            In above descriptions, it was mentioned that Internet is the worldwide Information Super Highway. But to collect the information, you must get help of the information retrieval procedures. There are several popular websites which use powerful search engines to collect various types of information within seconds. They are Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista and like. There also search sites for specific topics, like MEDLINE, Library of Congress, and Amazon etc. They also act as publication centers of different news, advertisements and other items.