February
2000
Online
Newsletter for Greater Essex County Computer Using
Professionals
Hey,
the newsletter won another award! We were
recognized by Edunet
Connect
as a Site of the Week. Their graphic is
proudly displayed on the home page. Edunet
Connect is an online service provided by the Baxter
Group in Toronto. The Baxter Group deals
with various media including CD-ROM publishing,
paper publishing (they do the ECOO newsletter) and
Internet publishing. The
month of January was an unusually busy one for
everyone. The highlight for me, definitely,
had to be the distribution of the Social Studies,
History, and Geography CD-ROM. A lot of good
people put a lot of hard work into the research and
design of this thing. There have been some
questions come forth and I thought I would answer
them here. Sometimes
I get a DNS Error. Who
found these sites? I
love the Webquests. Where can I find
more? Is it
a Teacher Resource or a Student Resource? Does
it go on the fileserver? Is
that the only way to use it? There
are indeed many ways to skin a cat. Find out
by contacting myself or your CAIT. Even
better, if you have your own way of using things,
please share with others.
January-June
Computer
PD Calendar
When
we asked for permissions from webmasters for the
use of their site and they gave it to us, we had
their permission for their site only. The
Internet, being the beast that it is, has links all
over the place. So, while we may be able to
get some of the content, where the site links to
another requires an Internet connection for the
entire content.
Groups
of teachers from all of the boards participating in
the project did the research and the links to the
Curriculum expectations. From the opening
screen of the CD-ROM, there is a credit page where
all of the teachers are listed. In Greater
Essex County, Janice Blencowe, Dan Mooney, Michael
Oddy, and myself looked for pages in Grades
1-3.
Webquests
are awesome. There's no doubt about it.
In October
1998,
I had featured Bernie Dodge's original Webquest
website and suggested this was a great way to use
the Internet effectively in the classroom.
Since that time, I have offered workshops dealing
with the creation of Webquests. Look to hear
more about this terrific technique in the
future.
The
original concept behind this and last year's
Science and Technology CD-ROM resource was that it
would be a teacher resource. It was
originally seen as a way to get contemporary
resources available for elementary school teachers
to help deal with the new Ontario Curriculum.
However all of the sites are student appropriate
for the grade level and many teachers are
also using it as a student
resource.
It
could, if you have the hard drive space and the
demand from teachers to use it that way. Many
of our technicians have done a great job of
mounting it that way in their schools.
However, that's not the only way. If all that
you'd like the students to use are the webquests,
they are all neatly organized in a directory on the
CD-ROM. Just use that directory's contents.
Ditto for any of the actual
sites.
Certainly
not. The index pages are located on the
district's web server. So, it is possible to
just link yourself or your students to their.
In fact, later on in this newsletter, you'll see
that there is a new student portal designed that
can do the job for you easily. If you read
this month's CAITs' Corner, you'll even see a
suggestion about how to do a Webquest without
Internet access.