Netsurfer Education 02.09

Could there be a better time to teach William Golding's masterpiece, 'The Lord of the Flies'? The silly contrivances and self-conscious exhibitionism of the shallowly mean-spirited 'Survivor' have nothing on the fearsome truths of survival and death among little boys trying to live through their island ordeal. Look to headlines, too, to spark discussions on bullying and manipulation, tribalism and cliques, mob mentality and the cost of speaking out, the political value of a faceless enemy, survival and sustainability, or the corrosiveness of power. Consistently ranked among the very best books of the 20th century, "The Lord of the Flies" examines what little boys are made of - and it's not frogs or snails or puppy dog tails. Two fine sites detail the allegorical book at the high school level. New media publishing student Michael Gerenser offers an award-winning, graphicallly satisfying site that demonstrates his skills and appreciation of the story admirably. The Sparknotes site is equally attractive and thorough. There's not much to choose between these two excellent sites; a third plain text site, apparently a lecture by Ernest J, uses several models to analyze facets of the novel at the university level, drawing on Marx, Baudelaire, and Plato, among others.
Gerenser: http://www.gerenser.com/lotf/
Sparknotes: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/
Ernest J: http://www.hisf.no/~ernstj/lectures/lord.html

SOCIAL SCIENCES
History, geography, political science, sociology, law, anthropology, philosophy, and archeology

If Only It Really Had Been the War to End All Wars

It was called the Great War, and ten million gave their lives on its battlefields. It lasted four years and changed the world forever. It was called The War to End All Wars, which would seem funny if it weren't so awful. Fourteen years into the new century and the nations of the world tried to slaughter each other for four years. What did the world learn from this horror? Evidently not much, as about 20 years after the end of the First World War the Second one began. It's been 82 years since the armistice that ended World War I. In 1998, on the 80th anniversary of the armistice, the BBC put up an excellent site about this terrible and bloody conflict. The site has lots of multimedia content, and it will fascinate history buffs along with those who are just curious. There's some old newsreel footage, and audio interviews with soldiers, both of which require Real Player. There are articles about the antecedents and beginnings of the war, along with maps and photos. There are also pertinent links. This is a comprehensive site, with heaps of material. The site allows a glimpse into a hellish world, and after even a glimpse one wonders how people can continue to perpetrate this kind of madness on each other.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1998/10/98/world_war_i/newsid_197000/197437.stm

Holocaust and a Boy

Genocide is no easy task, but during his tenure Hitler's machine did manage to exterminate six million of Europe's nine million Jews. This is an incomprehensible and mind-boggling statistic - and the very enormity of the lies and savagery was part of what the Nazis were banking on to justify and camouflage their actions. The people that were murdered were not statistics, though. They were men, women, and children - neighbors and even friends of the murderers. Sometimes we may look at the gray pictures in books about the Holocaust and wonder what their lives were like. One such picture is of a small Jewish child in a cap and knickers being led at gunpoint by a uniformed Nazi. A fellow named Louis Bülow in Denmark has done some research, and has developed this Web page to tell this boy's story. His name is Tsvi C. Nussbaum, and his story serves to put a human face on the monstrous tragedy. Be warned that there are graphic and horrific images on this site, so it's really not suitable for young children. Bülow has also included other Holocaust-related pages at the site, including pages about Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler. The site is obviously a labor of love, and these very human stories can help us appreciate the enormity of what happened.
http://home8.inet.tele.dk/aaaa/Holocaust2.htm

Great Ideas for Teaching Marketing

Whoa, this is another compendium all right, but what a feast it is: scores, scads, oodles of articles about teaching marketing, presumably mainly intended for college use, although some of the ideas probably could be adapted for business classes in high school. It's a straightforward place, with no visual allure to distract or attract, just no-frills presentations and fool-proof navigation. It's plain all right, but it packs a seductive punch with its helpful, well written ideas on how to convert those green-behind-the-ears students into marketing tyros. The short presentations, observations, tips, and suggestions are all simply grouped under broad topic headings such as product, pricing, promotion and communications, consumer behavior, international, marketing research, and more. Wal-Mart, look out!
http://www.swcollege.com/marketing/gitm/gitm.html

Netsurfer Recommendations

Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the cover or title to order the item at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and send a few pennies our way as well.

Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case
Frank Sikora
Univ. of Alabama Press; ISBN: 0817305203

In May, two men surrendered themselves for trial in a case nearly 40 years old. It was the 1963 Sunday morning church bombing that killed four teenaged girls in Birmingham, yet one more landmark tragedy in the litany of events that finally confirmed civil rights definitively for America's Black population in the 1960s. (We'll reserve comment on their practical application.) Still, it manages to stand apart from the stories of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders - as, truth be told, they all manage to stand apart. When the four girls, dressed in their Sunday best, primping just before services, died in the blast, they galvanized a large part of the American population, not to mention the fact that their deaths shook the city and state to their foundations. It took years for an official with real power to commit government resources to the investigations; suspects, long on investigators' short lists, have died or come to long overdue trial over the years. The final two trials may be in the offing now. Sikora doesn't spend a lot of time on analysis. The events, played out with so few subtleties in their day, speak loud and clear across the decades even now. Spike Lee's Oscar-nominated 1997 chronicle of the murders and their aftermath, 4 Little Girls is notable for its unaffected use of historical footage. For Lee, too, the events and people speak eloquently enough.

LANGUAGE ARTS
English studies, grammar, poetry, prose, and second language studies

Learning with Mysteries

Although it's probably not true that if you're having fun you must be learning, it does seem to follow that learning is enhanced when students and teachers are enjoying themselves. At any rate that's the theory behind Learning with Mysteries; everybody loves mysteries, so use 'em to learn with. For MysteryNet it's kind of self-serving because mysteries and online mysteries are their business, and indeed this site doesn't ever take you out of its own warm embrace. The educational material here is intended for Grades 4 and up and is fairly generic in nature, leaving it pretty much up to the teacher to take the suggestions and make something of them. However, there are worksheets to use, vocabulary exercises, a write-a-mystery section, and you can work the weekly online Solve-it Yourself mystery into the curriculum as part of the educational material. The main learning skills involved appear to be critical thinking, analysis, and reading and writing. Of course, MysteryNet is more than an educational site, and if you're a mystery buff yourself, well then you'll probably find this site of interest for personal reasons also.
http://www.mysterynet.com/learn/

Writer's Complex

Cathy Copley, Larry Greenberg, Elaine Handley, and Susan Oaks have conspired to take the mystery out of writing university assignments. Boiled down to a pat formula, it amounts to understanding the lingo before you put hand to keyboard and the use of strategies to, in their words, "enter the conversation". In the Research Room, they explain what a research paper is all about and how to prepare a good one, with many tips, suggestions, and ideas. They also provide fairly simple workshops, each with its own quiz, on essay writing, punctuation, grammar, and style. Several cautions: this reviewer couldn't reach the File Cabinet which is supposedly stuffed with papers written by students, and the e-mail address for comments is no longer valid, so the Tutor's Mailbox presumably no longer works. The Faculty Lounge was also pretty lifeless. Although this looks like a site abandoned before being completed, there is still some useful material here for those who need pointers on grinding out those overdue assignments.
http://coord_notes.esc.edu/admin/complex.nsf/complexhome?OpenForm

FINE ARTS
Visual arts, music, theater, and dance

Contemporary Poetry Set to Music

Few sites, even those devoted exclusively to education and lesson plans, present their information as cleanly and smartly as does the Kennedy Center at its Curricula, Lessons and Activities pages. As summary opens the lesson plan, and branches out to detail equipment and materials, relevant (American) national standards, the strategies and instructional plan, an assessment, and resources. Specifically, we looked at the lesson plan on learning with lyrics, under music and society. The lesson plan aims to make students think about lyrics (and goodness know that would be a blessing) in relation to the social issue or event that they address. The plan is a complex one, braiding social studies and social expression with the music that kids relate to so well. It asks the students to look at the artist as seriously as they would consider a work in relation to Hemingway's personality or Shakespeare's Elizabethan milieu. It's a finely tuned lesson plan, but only one among the smart and rich ArtsEdge educational program from the Kennedy Center. This URL address is very long; if it spills over two lines on your browser or in your e-mail, ensure that the entire address appears in your address bar.
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/teaching_materials/curricula/curriculum.cfm?mode=overview&curriculum_id=71

MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY
Mathematics, chemistry, physics, astrosciences, computing, technology, biology, and botany

Physics Classroom

This superior high school physics tutorial for juniors and seniors from Glendale South High School is admirably organized and presented. Broken down into lessons and sub-lessons, the latter are single page presentations, accompanied by charts, tables, illustrations, and animations, plus Check Your Understanding sections. The other lessons and sub-lessons are conveniently available on the side bar and concepts covered in other pages are hyperlinked for easy cross-referencing. Links to other sites from Glenbrook, including sites with interactive Shockwave animations, a multimedia studio for physics concepts, a quiz section, and a page for lab activities round out the contents page.
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/Class/BBoard.html

Breaking Out of the Virtual Cell

Cell biology has never been so enjoyable. Just click on the Tour link for a way-cool, interactive tutorial on cell structures and functions, featuring a beautiful model cell with flashing images and illustrated examples and enlargements that appear in a side viewer. If you've a slow connection, give it a couple of minutes to load. Clicking on a part takes you to a page where you can manipulate the image, zoom in and out, and even cut it open, plus get an explanation of the structure and function of the part. You can download the Virtual Cell as a separate .exe/.zip file, and there are teachers' worksheets, suitable for high school sophomore biology. The Virtual Textbook section is still under construction, but if it's anything like the Cell section, there'll be lots more to see and do here.
http://personal.tmlp.com/Jimr57/index.htm

Base 10 Isn't the Only Way to Organize Numbers

Math teachers who want to make students aware of the arbitrary character of our base 10 system might find this site of interest. It is part of a larger site devoted to the study of the Maya, one of the amazing preColumbian civilizations responsible for a host of monuments and artifacts sitting in North American museums. The site makes clear that the Mayan base 20 system is superior for keeping track of dates and even has the concept of zero, but it is a rather bare site that a teacher will have to supplement with in-class illustrations and demonstrations.
http://www.ties.k12.mn.us/~mayatch/mq96/lesson/mathsci/827271891.html

Killer Whales

Suitable for fourth through sixth grades, this easy to use, non-bandwidth-busting educational site from Sea World about this popular cetacean is illustrated, but not lavishly; just the facts, Ma'am. Sections include habitat and distribution, senses, adaptation and behavior, diet, reproduction, communication and echolocation, all in everyday language and with simple terms for the young sea mammal enthusiast. There are links to the Shamu-cam at Sea World and a film clip (8 Mb) from Shamu TV, plus a reading list for young readers, and a bibliography.
http://www.seaworld.org/killer_whale/killerwhales.html

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Sports and Health

Physical Education Lesson Plans

As befits a site that is really the product of contributions, the lesson plans here vary widely in quality and some of the write-ups are better done than others. All of the plans are intended for children from K-12, although our sampling suggests that material for the younger grades predominates. Most of the plans are quite short and nicely combine learning with physical activities. The site is not only a great place to cadge ideas for home or school, but is also a community allowing teachers to share their ideas with others. The contributions are organized into sections on fitness, tag games, classroom games, health and nutrition, throwing and catching, assessments, classroom management, dance, gymnastics, holidays, field and activity days, and jump ropes and bean bags, each with its own pull-down menu. There is also a list of about 20 or so other Web-based phys ed resources.
http://schools.eastnet.ecu.edu/pitt/ayden/physed8.htm

SKILLS FOR LIVING
Domestic sciences, study skills and other day-to-day skills for getting through life

Connecting with Kids

Parenting is a tough job. Sometimes, the toughest part of the job can be talking to children about uncomfortable issues. Sex and drugs are two such issues, but these are only part of the larger picture. These are topics that parents can often muster up the courage to talk to their kids about, because these are issues that parents find important. Kids, however, have other concerns that are just as vital, yet these concerns may never get discussed. That children and their parents can have trouble relating to each other is not new, and there have certainly been many books written on the subject. Connecting With Kids is a Web site that tries to deal with all of the key issues. The site is authored by experts in the field, and they've conducted interviews with parents, children, and other experts. Articles about relationships, money, school, hate groups, and much more present the results. Video clips of kids talking about these issues accompany many of the articles. Connecting with Kids is produced by CWK Network, which also produces a TV show. The About Us section of the site says, "Our goal is to work with cable and educational networks to provide reality based kid's programming that gives kids a voice in the discussion on social and health issues affecting them". This is an ambitious project, and if it isn't the final word on these topics, it certainly can be an aid to communication.
http://www.connectingwithkids.com/

RESOURCES
Encyclopedia, libraries, reference resources, and other places to which teachers can turn

Teaching with Excellence

The down-to-earth and succinct layout and contents of this site somehow convey a seriousness of purpose that fits the topic well. Consisting of 25 sections - each containing a range of improvement topics, and two appendices, one a questionnaire for students to rate a teacher, the other a self-appraisal instrument for teachers - the site presents over 200 teaching techniques that faculty members at the University of California, Berkeley have found to be effective in their courses. This Berkeley compendium is mainly a reference tool that encourages users to zero in on the specific areas they want to improve, through the use of the appendices and then some of the techniques suggested. All of the suggestions and ideas are succinctly presented, often in just a few lines.
http://uga.berkeley.edu/sled/compendium/

Free Stuff for Canadian Teachers

Free Stuff for Canadian Teachers is a site where educators, home schoolers, parents, and students can find links to various offers for free resources, materials, lesson plans, software, catalogues, samples and so forth, and it's intended as a partial antidote to the prevalence of US material in many freebie sites. Very often, especially with offers involving material of real monetary value, there's a catch, so the usual cautions apply; some of the offers are thinly disguised marketing efforts. Many require you to enter your e-mail address, an obvious invitation to be flooded with commercial messages. Look before you leap, we suggest. Still, numerous offers are for educational material put out by government departments or corporate PR departments and not likely to cost you money or inundate you with junk e-mail. There are national and (some) provincial programs, and items marked with a red maple leaf are for, duh, Canadians only. That's basically for material sent by mail, where they obviously respond to Canadian requests only. This isn't a question of jingoistic nationalism at work here; the restriction usually makes sense in the context of the offer.
http://www.thecanadianteacher.com/

ADMINISTRATION
Education theory, school and board administration, and teaching aids

Locations, Liminalities and Literacies: Science Education in the Crash Zone (and other heterotopian spaces)

With a title like that, how could you possibly pass this one by! One of the problems for the currently non-academic is to decide if complex material like this piece by Noel Gough, Deakin Centre for Education and Change, is inscrutable bafflegab written for the incestuous cloisters of academia (are we being TOO judgmental?) or a serious contribution to human culture. Fortunately, this reviewer has the easy part of simply bringing the site to your attention and, well, the rest is up to you - not that we're aloof from the concept of getting a little debate going here! At any rate the author raises the interesting question of the educational implications of our increasing exposure to virtual domains and how this may change how we view ourselves as physically bound. So it starts, and some 10,000 plus words later it ends, having traversed McLuhan and other media gurus en route. The only thing we will say of a critical nature has nothing to do with virtual spaces but basic expository writing; the paper would have benefited enormously, if communication is the objective, from a good informative abstract or conclusion.
http://www.swin.edu.au/aare/99pap/gou99688.htm

ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
Distance learning, home schooling, and special education opportunities

Learn in Freedom! Education Reform, Home-Schooling Resources

Karl M. Bunday, the author of this invaluable site, isn't too fond of state-funded schools and it shows. He's a keen proselytizer for home schooling and has compiled an impressive range of arguments in support of it here. He claims that more than one million children are taught at home in the US, and more globally, and he's out to up that number with internal and external links to home school resources of all kinds, information on how to get started, practical advice on finding teaching materials, and the skinny on colleges that accept home schooled applicants. For good measure, he throws in comments from Nobel prize winners who hated school (including Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (hands up those who know the prize category), and Bertrand Russell), considerable opinion about the problem of age socialization due to age segregation in schools, reading instructions, books on home schooling, bibliographies on education issues, resource guides, and a guide to education-related newsgroups. Overall, this is an invaluable - if opinionated - compendium of encouragement and ammunition. The viewpoints, links, and information are all on the home schooling side of the argument. Of course, there's a case to be made for the other side, but this isn't that place.
http://learninfreedom.org/

TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING
Computing as the medium

Online Map Creation

Here's a neat online service for creating custom maps for printing, downloading, or just plain fun. You have to know the latitude and longitude to set the boundaries, then check the boxes for political boundaries, rivers, cities, topography and bathymetry, or tectonic features, and you yourself can define locations and create labels. Once the maps are formed you can zoom in or out, or define a new map center by simply clicking on the original. There is also a choice of six projections. We recommend you consult the handy how-to page to help familiarize yourself with this tool, which gives you better control over your online cartography.
http://www.aquarius.geomar.de/omc/

CONTACT AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

Netsurfer Education Home Page:
Subscribe, Unsubscribe:
Frequently Asked Questions:
Submission of Newsworthy Items:
Letters to the Editor:
Advertiser and Sponsor Inquiries:
Netsurfer Communications:

http://www.netsurf.com/nse/
http://www.netsurf.com/nse/subscribe.html
http://www.netsurf.com/nse/nefaq.html
nse-pressroom@netsurf.com
nse-editor@netsurf.com
sales@netsurf.com
http://www.netsurf.com/

CREDITS

Publisher: Arthur Bebak Editor: Judith David Contributing Editor: Production Manager: Bill Woodcock Netsurfer Communications, Inc. President: Arthur Bebak Vice President: S.M. Lieu	Writers and Netsurfers: Jon Baum Mary Daniels Brown Michael Aaron Dennis Beth Lewis Michael Luke Elizabeth Rollins Dov Schwartz
NETSURFER EDUCATION © 2000 Netsurfer Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. NETSURFER EDUCATION is a trademark of Netsurfer Communications, Inc.