Cognitive Constructivism:
Information Banks: The InternetCognitive Constructivism:
Information Banks: The InternetThe Internet is a complex network of interconnected computers. More accurately the Internet is a "network of networks". Computers connected to the Internet can communicate with each other, and individual users of these computers can exchange electronic mail, share data and information, join electronic discussions of a wide range of topics, and find information in hundreds of thousands of databases available "on the net." The information you can find includes everything from text to pictures and illustrations as well as sounds, music, video, and more.
There are two main ways the Internet is used in education today: as a professional resource for teachers and as a tool for children. We will not provide a detailed overview of all the ways the Internet can be used in education today. If you are interested a list of additional sources of information is provided at the end of this section.
Our emphasis is on the range of information banks available to students (and teachers) on the Internet. The examples below are only a few of the thousands of information banks available now. You can read the explanation of these sites or click on the links to try them out on your own.
ExamplesThis site contains documents, photographs, movies, and sound recordings that tell the story of Gettysburg, where major battles were fought during the American Civil War. The site includes resources for educators including lesson plans.
URL: http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/history/gb/gbhome.html
This gopher site at North Carolina State University has thousands of historic government documents in files that can be downloaded.
URL: gopher://gopher.lib.ncsu.edu:70/11/library/disciplines
Time Detectives is a problem solving tool for the World Wide Web. It focuses mainly on the information bank and phenomenaria facets. In particular, learners may choose from subject search, timeline, keyword search, and regional maps of American Revolutionary War to start their study of the Revolutionary War topics. These are tools designed to give the students the basic information they need to do their interpretation of a piece of American history.
URL: http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/history/demo.html
This site is organized in a question and answer format. All the questions are about the rain forest. For example, "If 150 acres of forest land are being destroyed every minute, how many acres will be destroyed in a month? 6 months? One year?" The site includes text and pictures.
URL: http://www.igc.apc.org/ran/kids_action/questions.html
When discussing rain forests in other countries, students will find that the literature often uses metric measurements. What is a hectare? How long is a kilometer? How much is a kilo liter? This web page with common equivalent weights and measures compared can help students learn about metric equivalents.
The web page suggest that the teacher may want to extend this activity by using colored chalk to mark lengths and areas on the school yard in both Metric and English System units so that students can make comparisons.
URL: http://chemserv.bc.edu/weights-n-measures.html
This is an on-line Webster's Dictionary. To search for a word, a user simply type in the word in the box.
My search for the word "hypertext" resulted in its definition on the next web page:
hypertext n: machine-readable text that is not sequential but is organized by a hypertext system so that related items of information are connected and can be presented together
URL: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~anyuta/pages/websters.html
This web site teaches basic map-making concepts such as projection, latitude and longitude, and distortion.
URL: http://loki.ur.utk.edu/ut2kids/maps/map.html
Additional Information
"What exactly does the World-Wide Web have to offer education?" This web site attempts to articulate some possible answers. Viewers can begin by choosing from any of the following sections:
URL: http://k12.cnidr.org:90/web.intro.html
This web page traces the history of the Internet back to the 1960s. It also includes a Internet growth summary.
URL: http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/htmldocs/timeline.html
These useful links are collected by Learning Technology and Distance Education Department at the University of Wisconsin.
URL: http://www.wisc.edu/learntech/grp/seledres.htm
Students, teachers, state education agencies, and others concerned about teaching and learning are using the Internet to create and locate educational materials. This makes the Internet a wonderful tool for education. The Department of Education homepage provides links to its own servers and sites run by organizations funded by the Department, as well as other valuable educational locations.
The many resources on the Internet are organized into six categories. These are:
URL: http://www.ed.gov/EdRes/EdRes.html
The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), established in 1966, is a national information system designed to provide users with access to an extensive body of education-related literature. ERIC is supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and the National Library of Education.
URL: http://www.aspensys.com/eric/
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