Slide 1:
Hello again and welcome to COM 333 - “Communicating through Internet” – this, lecture number 10, “Internet in the Schools”.

Slide 2:
Well, we hear a lot about Internet, and in fact we’re using it in an educational setting.  But what about the electronic schoolhouse, particularly at the K-12 level?  What impact is the Internet having on education?  What impact do we see the Internet having on educating the workforce for the new century?  And what about the importance of the Internet to teachers?  Does that cut both ways?  Is Internet in fact a great equalizer?  Does it make those under-funded schools just as good as the well-funded schools?  And how about the seamy side of the web?  And how do we protect children?  Or educate them through this medium?

Slide 3:
Well, preparing for the future.  As you know, the Internet we talk about so many times as the “information super highway”.  But as we discussed earlier, it actually is a gravel road, if even that, right now.  But the future does seem to be electronic; in fact, it seems that so much of our society is going to be using more and more electronic resources, whether it be in the workplace, or if it be for entertainment, or of course in the schoolroom.  And you know, kids seem to have an affinity for computer use.  The stand-up comedians have a lot of fun with this, on how 2, and 3, and 4 year olds can perform so well on computers.  Kids seem to be intuitive, they seem atuned to the methods of the computer.  They seem relatively uninhibited.  They’re not afraid that they’re going to break something by pressing on the keyboard.  And they’re adventuresome and inquisitive.  They want to go places.  They want to see things.  They want to try out new technologies.

Slide 4:
As a supplement, the Internet provides an extraordinary resource for education.  It extends the library, or sometimes called resource center, in the K-12 school extensively.  On the Internet, there are more then 10,000 books available, and you know most of those books are ones that are out of copyright; of course, we talked about copyright.  Most of those have been published more than 75 years ago.  And so there are many, many classics available on the Internet.  There are thousands and thousands of journals and magazines and newspapers that are available through the electronic medium.  And thousands and thousands of educational sites with particular lessons and exercises, and hundreds of online libraries that, to one extent or another, have taken their resources and made them available through the Internet.  And, of course, there are those virtual laboratories; you know -- NASA provides an extraordinary resource in showing space images from the Hubble space telescope, from shuttle launches, and the like -- you can even get live feeds from outer space.  And then there are those virtual frog dissection sites.  I know that was of particular interest to one of my daughters, who just, a vegetarian in fact, who couldn’t stomach the idea of dissecting a frog.  So she saw this as really an alternative, a way, a much better way; that saves a lot of frog lives, and saves a lot of irritation and otherwise discomfort on the part of students.  And there are several sites that provide online dissections.

Slide 5:
Well, what about the distant and disabled, those rural students in particular?  These are students and schools that are limited by their resources and it’s not only the funding that they receive, but the critical mass of students in a smaller rural school, one might have oh, let’s say maybe only 3 students who want to take French, or German, or Chinese, or some other foreign language, and that’s really not a critical mass -- not enough students to support a teacher offering a section or several sections, as the years go by, of a foreign language.  But the Internet can.  The Internet can allow students from multiple school districts to gather together to receive instruction in foreign languages for example, or advanced mathematics.  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has an outstanding project, which provides calculus courses for those students in high schools where they don’t really have enough students to justify offering calculus every single year.  And there are many other courses and activities; you know, chess clubs, all kinds of activities, which are participatory, that can be facilitated through the Internet and allow students who are relatively distant, that is, isolated by the location of their school, to meet with others who have, who share their interests.  And what about the disabled, either temporary or permanent?  Let’s begin with the temporary.  Those students, who through an injury or an illness, have to miss a week of class, or a month, or perhaps a couple of months of classes.  Well, using laptop computers now, many places across the country allow students to eavesdrop, that is, to see and hear a class presentation and also to ask questions through the Internet using the computer medium to access the class real-time, so that while the class is ongoing at the schoolhouse, the student might be at a hospital or at home recuperating from an injury or an illness, and still be able to meet with the class.  And the same is true about those who might have more serious disabilities that might take them out of the classroom for a year or even more.  It allows them to keep that contact and the benefit from the interaction with the teacher and interaction with the other students.

Slide 6:
Well, certainly there’s an impact on teachers and those teachers who don’t have computers skills.  I think those that have some anxiety about the Internet -- many of them do certainly.  And one has to question whether those who have not integrated Internet already into their instruction, whether they may be short-changing their own students --  by not infusing this technology into the teaching of science, or the teaching even of social studies, or the teaching of foreign languages, or other topics.  Students are being short changed because their not getting the experience with technologies that they’ll be using once they get into the workplace.  So these teachers need training, they need support, they need examples, and they need role models.  Now those teachers who have these skills are able to expand their classroom around the world.  I know of a seventh grade teacher in a small, relatively rural community in Riverton, Illinois, who is able to take her seventh grade students and have them meet electronically with students in South Africa; and they can talk about differences in their culture and it allows this kind of one-on-one discussion between students who are approximately the same age, and for them to better understand each other’s culture.  This kind of interaction helps again to expand the horizon for those students who are in schools that are relatively distant or rural or don’t have exposure to multiple cultures.  And by infusing the technology into the curriculum, the teachers are in fact helping to train these students, helping to prepare them for their life in the workforce.

Slide 7:
Well, the question is often raised, particularly by politicians; that is, can Internet bring parity among schools?  You know, we talk commonly in the educational community about the haves and the have-nots, and certainly there are schools with excellent libraries, well-funded schools.  There are others that don’t have good libraries.  And Internet does provide an instant expansion of the library by adding thousands of books and journals and other library resources.  It also provides an instant expansion of the curriculum, potentially, as we discuss those foreign language courses, or perhaps advanced science courses, and certainly mathematics courses.  And it also provides that kind of extended interaction with other cultures.  But Internet does not provide more teachers per say, or more wet laboratories, where actual physical experiments are taking place, and it doesn’t provide more P.E. and another gymnasium.  So Internet can’t bring everything to a school district and certainly I wouldn’t want to suggest that.  But it does provide lots and lots of resources that can enhance the learning that goes on in school districts.

Slide 8:
Well, then, of course, what about the seamy side of the Internet?  What about pornography?  Pedophilia?  How do we protect our children from these kinds of exposures?  The answer, of course, is educate.  And that really is an important component of infusing Internet into the K-12 curriculum.  You know, Internet is most likely to remain diverse as it is.  It’ll be a wide variety of cultures and methods of expression.  Just as wide as the world is.  Students have to learn from the very start how to navigate in this kind of large environment, something much larger than the neighborhood in which they may be growing up.  It’s like living in a very large city or perhaps a global village.  And probably that analogy from the sixties is one that is a very apt for the Internet.  Right now one can access people around the world as easily as you would access people by knocking on the next door.

Slide 9:
Well, Internet, in conclusion, is an incredible tool in education.  It helps to prepare students for the future.  It helps to enrich resources in the schools.  But along with all of these valuable assets comes a responsibility to teach our students how to responsibly use the Internet, how to safely navigate the Internet.  Well, for this week, I’d like you to visit the couple of links that I have, and one of those links is a huge teacher page, which I maintain for K-12 teachers; and it includes discipline area resources, so you can choose to look at resources in social studies, or science, or special education, or mathematics, or language arts, etc.  I’d like you, as we’ll discuss on the WebBoard, to go to that teacher page and probe some of those resources and find one that you find particularly useful to the education of K-12 students; and we’ll be talking about that in WebBoard this week.  So till next week, we’ll be seeing you on the Internet.