Using the Internet in Education

The Internet is an exciting medium which allows students to visit far off locations with minimal effort and cost – extending the classroom to visit far off places and peoples, enabling students to learn more about our world and our place in it.

The project aims to demonstrate the potential of the Internet for developing high quality educational applications, introducing it to New Zealand educators, help them gain experience, and to help stimulate further development.

There are many excellent examples where the Internet has been used on education projects. Below is a small selection, including some New Zealand ones.

MayaQuest is similar to to Amazon Adventure. A team of American educators cycled down into Mexico and Guatemala – exploring Mayan ruins, and introducing school students to the history of the Mayan civilisation and modern day Central America. The support team even included a television unit so that MayaQuest could broadcast programs on educational television networks throughout the United States. The MayaQuest web site contains its schedules, snd background information about the Mayans and the places being visited. The site also includes daily diaries and photographs taken by the expedition team.

Discovery Online. The Discovery site is an online magazine operating in parallel with the Discovery TV Channel. There are regular special features for readers to follow an event, such as the expedition attempting to retrieve a section of the Titanic, or a river rafting expedition travelling through the Grand Canyon.

Telecom Education Foundation has run several interesting projects for schools over the past few years, including Seakeepers and Icebound.

International Centre for Antarctic Research LEARNZ project. This is a well organised and interesting resource in which children can learn about Antarctica, its environment, and about the people who live and work there.

Wellington Regional Council Water Resource information pages. This is a colourful and fun resource for children to learn about the water cycle.

Department of Survey and Land Information Geography package. A very well set out, and fun, resource for geography education. Learn about the Mt Cook landslide, and how geographic information is collected (with a very interesting section on getting information from satellites satellites).

New Zealand Education Web. A useful index of NZ educational sites maintained by Copeland Wilson & Associates in Wellington.

Science Learning Network is a US site focusing on science subjects, and includes links to online museums.

Berit's Best Sites for Children is an extensive US-based list of links to sites suitable for primary and intermediate-school children. Each site has been carefully selected, reviewed and given a rating out of 5.

Index of Resources for Historians is a HUGE list of links (about 1700) with a primary focus on history, although there are many other interesting links only loosely relatedto history. The list takes a long time to download, but is an extremely useful reference for educational resources on a wide variety of topics.

Al Bodzin's Home Page. This is a helpful collection of useful links for teachers, set up by Al Bodzin, at North Carolina State University. Al was formerly a biology teacher in a US high school, but currently has a research fellowship in Instructional Technology for Science Education. This home page contains links to Nanoworld, Ocean Planet, and Classroom Connect, and other sites focusing on biology, ecology, science, and education.

There are many many more sites on the Internet, which you can find by following the education links in search engines such as Search NZ, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Infoseek. Web66 is another helpful index for educators.

The Amazon Adventure aims to make another useful education resource available to the Internet community – with a particular focus on using this material in New Zealand classrooms.