Using the Internet

(adapted from articles first published in Primary English magazine)

 

The Internet is a vast ‘spider’s web’ of computers all around the world connected by telephone lines. Anyone who links their computer to this network can immediately contact anyone else who is linked up. If the Internet was a book, it would be the biggest book in the world with billions of pages. But unlike a paper book which remains in one place, any page in this book can lead to any other page: Page One could be in England, but Page Two can be in South America, or Australia… and I can move from one page to another without any sense of movement or delay. A book like this is sometimes called hypertext,  words linked to places, pictures, sounds or anything else. Links between pages usually appear as underlined phrases, often in blue writing. Your arrow pointer turns into a hand when you move the mouse over a link, and one click takes you to the destination.

 

A hypertext document is called a web page, and a linked collection of web pages in one place is called a web site. Every web site has its own unique address (sometimes called URL – a Unique Resource Locator). Type the address into the address line at the top of your browser screen and press Enter to go there.

 

As soon as you publish anything on the Internet, it becomes accessible to anyone else in the world who knows the address of your document. It is very easy to publish anything you want in this way. This is good news and bad news. It’s good news because I can find out all kinds of wonderful things: it’s bad news because there are no restrictions on what I publish. Most real-life book publishers have a ‘slush pile’ of unsolicited manuscripts. Some of them may be very good, but most will be rejected. The Internet on the other hand has no ‘slush pile,’ it is the slush pile. Everything that could be published on the Internet, is published. But among all this dross there is also a very large quantity of useful, helpful and valuable information. ‘Literacy’ will increasingly be the ability to obtain, evaluate and understand the information you want.

 

Using email

Now that so many computers in the world are linked together by modems and phone lines, it has become very easy to send immediate messages from one computer to another. This is known as email (short for ‘electronic mail.’) As a form of communication, Email may be described as half-way between the letter and the telephone. It gives you time to consider what you want to say—like a letter, but allows immediate communication—like a telephone.

 

Email comes in two types. When you sign up for an Internet account with a service provider, you will usually be given an e-mail address. It is usually something like myname@service.provider This means that you now have a sort of electronic pigeon-hole. A space on a computer at the service provider’s headquarters will have your name on it and become your ‘mailbox.’ I used to wonder how I could receive email when my computer was turned off. It’s easy, because you only bring the mail to your own computer when you visit the mailbox. Messages for you will accumulate and you can collect them whenever you wish. And at the same time you can also send out any letters you have written. This is a very economical process, only requiring a few minutes connected to the Internet. This sort of email is technically called ‘post-office protocol’ or POP3. You can therefore assemble a whole class bundle of messages before sending them. The only snag is that you need to use a computer which is set up to access your own account: you can’t just go to any computer and pick up your letters.

 

In your mailbox you will find a number of different boxes (or folders) which you can visit at any time. These are usually:

 

The Inbox New messages land here. Unread messages usually show a ‘closed’ envelope. You read them by clicking on them with the mouse, and can print them out or just leave them in the Inbox.

 

The Outbox Some email programs are set up so that when you ‘send’ a message it does not leave your computer immediately, but goes to the Outbox. The benefit of this is that you can compose a whole batch of messages and put them in the Outbox ready to go. When you choose to ‘Send and Receive’ the computer goes on-line, sends all the messages, and picks up any new mail you may have. That will only take a few seconds, so the only cost of sending all the messages will be a few seconds of local call telephone time.

 

The Sent Messages Box A copy of messages you send may be stored here. It’s often very useful to refer back to these, or send failed messages again.

 

The Deleted Items Box When you delete a message from anywhere else, it goes here, so you have another chance if you deleted it by mistake. If you delete it from the Deleted Items Box, it really is permanently gone!

 

Another kind of e-mail is known as Internet Mail. This works on the World Wide Web itself. Your mailbox will be on a web page, rather than in your own service provider’s computer. It has advantages and disadvantages. It can be reached from a computer anywhere in the world, so you can check your email at school, at home, or even away on holiday.  But you generally have to write your messages while you are connected, which makes it more expensive in phone bills. It can also be slower than POP mail. There is nothing to stop you having several email accounts, possibly for different purposes. Maybe a school POP account you use with the children, and a personal web-based account you can reach at school or at home for your own correspondence, hobbies etc.

 

How secure is my email?

Any message you send passes through a number of different computers, and there is a remote possibility that it could be intercepted. The chance of anyone sifting through the millions of emails to tamper with yours is admittedly remote, but if it worries you, think of email as essentially ‘public’ like a postcard. Don’t use email for highly confidential documents—I recommend registered letters.

 

You can easily set up a free web-based account with a password, mailboxes, address book and everything you need. Yahoo Mail: go to www.yahoo.co.uk to register; Microsoft Hotmail: go to www.hotmail.com to register. (NB Hotmail accounts close down if you don’t use them for 30 days!)

 

Effective Searching

Connecting to the Internet for the first time is like gaining access to the biggest Library in the world, filled with millions of books: an exciting and awe-inspiring prospect! But the excitement can quickly give way to dismay and frustration as you begin to realise that this library has no catalogue, no librarian, and no labelling on the shelves… Just to make things worse, whole sections of the Library appear and disappear without notice. The Internet is a vast, uncontrolled and unedited collection of information. Thousands of new users join it every day, and thousands of old sites are closed down or abandoned. What makes it even more frustrating is that you know the information you need is somewhere out there, if only you could find it…

 

I will point out some simple strategies to help you find the information you are looking for. 'Search engines' are a good place to start. A search engine is a powerful piece of software which attempts to make some sense of the chaotic world of the Internet. There are two different approaches to this problem. Firstly, companies and individuals can register their web sites with a search engine, providing key words and details, rather like getting a listing in Yellow Pages. The search engine  called 'Yahoo!' works almost entirely in this way. Secondly, many search engines send out software 'agents' , automatic travellers which set off on a never ending journey, following links from page to page, and sending information back to base. This is compiled into a huge database or map of the web which you can visit and search. Web culture is full of metaphors, mostly animal, for this hunting process: so we find web spiders, crawlers, wolves and ferrets in a vast electronic menagerie. Not all web pages have links to other pages, so may never be sniffed out by these software agents. Some people estimate that more than 20% of the Web does not appear on search engines at all, and different search engines will certainly find different things.

 

You don't have to pay to use Search engines, as they make their money by advertising: usually in the form of a small 'banner' at the top of the screen. These are quite easy to ignore after a while… Search engines are also competing to become 'portals' - places which large numbers of people use as their main 'gateway' to the Internet. Yahoo! For example, is one of the most visited sites in the world, and offers a vast range of services over and beyond web searching. If you were starting up a shop, you would probably want to open it in a busy High Street, rather than down a quiet cul-de-sac, as the High Street is where the people are. Sites such as search engines, visited by millions of people each day, are though to be the places where money will be made in the future, the 'digital High Streets,' so they all want your business.

 

There are a few important issues to be noted right at the start. The main use of search engines world wide is to find sexually explicit material, and it is all too easy for a child to type in a rude word and gain access to large amounts of pornography. It is very important, therefore, to make sure that children are protected in school, and that your professional role as a teacher is protected. I would recommend some or all of the following strategies:

 

Using a Search Engine

On the address line at the top of your browser, type the address of Google, the world’s major search engine at present.      www.google.com and press Return.

 

When the page opens, go to Favourites (if you are using Internet Explorer) or Bookmarks (Netscape) and add this to your list. This is something you should do whenever you find a useful site, to save you typing complicated addresses over and over again. Look for a ‘type-in’ box: this is the place to start your search.

 

I want to find some information about Anne Fine, the 'Children's Laureate' so I'll type Anne Fine in the box, and click the word 'Search'. After a few moments, a message comes back from America, displaying the top ten results. Each result or 'hit' has a few words from the site, and a blue link you can click on to go and see the whole document. This search produced 891000… in other words, the search engine has found that number of  documents containing my search words. That's quite a small result, by Internet standards, but is obviously far too much information for me to deal with. It is also an indication that my first search has been badly designed. The search engine has found all the documents with the word ‘Anne’ in them, and all those with ‘Fine.’

 

Let's try again. This time type

            “Anne Fine”

putting the name in inverted commas. This tells the computer to find the exact phrase. This time I get 9300 returns - still a large amount of information, but now largely relevant.

 

We can improve this search yet further by using little words called Logical Operators: AND, OR or NOT. (The capital letters are important). Try this:

            “Anne Fine” AND “Care of Henry”

The search engine will now look for documents which include my chosen phrase AND the other term. Sure enough, Google now returns a list of 356 documents - a much more reasonable and focussed quantity of information to handle. Notice that Google says you don’t need the ‘AND’ - other search engines do.

“Anne Fine” “Care of Henry” review

Down to 11 returns: the more ‘keywords’ you use, the better the results.  If you want to use Internet searching as part of a school activity, most of the work on a search can be done before you go anywhere near a computer, working out exactly what you want to search for and formulating it in the clearest and least ambiguous language. That is good data-handling as well as good English, and will avoid a great deal of frustration and time-wasting.

 

The strategies I have described will work on many search engines, but it is useful to read the help guides on each one to find out its specialities. Here are the addresses for a number of different search engines.  If a search on one does not produce the result you want, try another one.

 

Google (www.google.com) is a superb fast search engine with little or no advertising. Keywords are assumed to have “AND” between them, and “-word” will exclude that word from the search.

All the web (www.alltheweb.com) is one to watch. Currently it claims to index more pages than Google.

AltaVista (www.altavista.com/ )A powerful search engine run by DEC Computers. Raging Search (www.raging.com) is AltaVista’s answer to Google.

Yahoo! (www.yahoo.co.uk/ ) A very popular search engine with a British department. Yahoo is organised more like a Library Catalogue than the other search engines.

Yahooligans! (www.yahooligans.com/ ) Yahoo!’s children’s department: a safe zone for children.

HotBot (www.hotbot.com ) A fast site with advanced search procedures.

Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com/ or www.ask.co.uk) and Ask Jeeves for Kids http://www.ajkids.com/ This search page allows you to type questions in plain English, and uses other search engines to come up with answers.

Look at www.searchenginewatch.com for up-to-date information on the world of search engines.

 

There are many other search engines worth a visit. Some are known as 'meta-search engines' as they take your request and submit it to a number of other search engines, compiling the results. One of the best - if you can cope with the name - is

Dogpile www.dogpile.com

MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com ) is also worth a visit.

 

One final comment about searching… your best resource is an enthusiast. When you find one good site, you will often find that it has links already set up to other good sites. Somebody who shares your interest has scoured the Internet on your behalf and your work has all been done for you.

 

Collecting Internet Materials

We have looked at the Internet and how to find useful information. Here is how you can use and keep the things that you find on a web site. As you read a long document on-line, you will be keenly aware of the clock ticking and your money trickling away. There are many ways to speed up this process or avoid it altogether.

1 Saving information

You can save the web page. That means that all the information will be stored on your computer, and you can refer to it, edit or print it without incurring phone bills.

 

When you save any document on your computer, you are given a choice between ‘Save’ and ‘Save as…’ The difference between these is important to understand.

 

‘Save’ stores the document. Your software decides how and where. For instance, Microsoft Word usually saves your writing as a ‘Word’ document, in a folder called ‘My documents.’ This is fine for most word processing jobs.

 

Selecting ‘Save as…’ (Fig. 1) allows you to make your own choices. It lets you choose what sort of document you want to save, and lets you decide where to put it.

This is particularly important when you try to save a web page. A web page is not what it seems. It looks just like a single page from a magazine, with writing and pictures, but in fact it is a collection of documents of various types. Each little picture, headline or block of text may be a separate document. So when you ‘save’ a web page this sometimes leads to disappointing results. You may find you have saved a document with lots of missing items, and odd spaces where you expect to see pictures. There are a few different ways of getting round this, using ‘Save as…’  When the ‘Save as…’ dialogue box appears (Fig. 2), click the down-pointing arrow to the right to see various choices.

a. Save as HTML/Web page…

This will give you all the text of the page laid out with ‘place holders’ where the pictures should be. Newer Browsers (version 5 or 6 will save the whole page complete, which is much better.)

 

b. Save as a text file…

This option will fillet all the writing out of the page and save it as plain, unornamented text. This is ideal if you just want the information with no fuss, and it also uses very little space on your own computer. You can read the document in your word processor. Go to File > Open and bring it into Word or whatever program you use. You may have to select ‘All files’ instead of ‘Word documents’ to find it, but you can use ‘Save as…’ to convert it into a normal Word document.

 

2. Saving Pictures

You can save any picture, small or large, that appears on a Web page. You might want to look at it later, or to edit it in a painting program, or to use it as an illustration in a document of your own. To do this,

·        Click your Right mouse button on the picture

·        Choose ‘Save picture as..’

·        Give the picture a new name if you wish

·        Find a place to save it, e.g. a floppy disc (drive a); a folder on your hard disc.

·        To retrieve the picture, double-click the little icon that represents it on your computer. This will activate a drawing program (e.g. Windows Paint) and display the picture for you to work on. Alternatively, go into Word. Click on the Insert menu and ‘Insert’ the picture into a document you are using.

 

4.  Copying materials directly into a word processor

This is a very useful strategy when you are collecting a variety of material from different web pages, as you search for materials and follow links from one page to another.

·        Start a new blank document in Microsoft Word

·        Log on to the internet as you usually do. Your normal starting page will fill the screen. You now have two programs running at once, Microsoft Word and your Internet browser.

·        At the bottom of your screen two boxes on the Task Bar represent the two programs you have opened. Try clicking on the boxes to move from one program to the other.

·        In the ‘Browser’ window, select a piece of text on the web page (drag the mouse pointer across it while holding down the left button.) Now go to Edit > Copy.

·        Click on the Task Bar to go into Word. Go to Edit > Paste. The text will appear on your Word page.

·        You can speed up this process by using Keyboard short cuts. These save you having to go up to the menus at the top of the screen. For shortcuts, hold down the key marked Ctrl (control) while you press a letter key. These three are useful and easy to remember as they are next to each other on the keyboard:

Ctrl+C copies text.

Ctrl+V pastes text.

Ctrl+X cuts text.

 

If you collect pieces of text in this way as you look at different web pages, you will end up with all the interesting things you have found collected in a single Word document. You can save this to read or print it out later.

 

A note about plug-ins

As a teacher using the Internet you will probably encounter the Literacy Support materials on the Standards Site, or want to look at an Ofsted Report. These come as a special kind of document called PDF (Portable Document Format) which requires an ‘Acrobat Reader.’ This is not a strenuous addition to the Literacy Hour, but an extra piece of software which ‘plugs’ into your browser. This may seem over-complicated, but there is a simple reason for it. It is about the way the Web displays documents. If I design my web site with exciting and striking lettering, I may be disappointed when I see it on someone else’s computer. My friend has a different sort of computer, with different typefaces, or fonts, so my carefully designed page looks all wrong on her screen. The authors of Government documents like us to see their documents presented just as they were planned to be, and PDF allows them to do this.

 

When your Browser meets one of these documents, it tries to run the plug-in program to display it. If you haven’t got the plug-in, you won’t see anything. Be careful at this point. The OFSTED site will point you to a link where you can down-load the Acrobat plug-in, but it is very large and may cost you a lot of phone time and patience as it trickles into your computer. By far the easiest way of getting Acrobat Plug-in is to buy one of the many Internet magazines with CD ROMs on the front. These discs usually have up to date copies of browsers, plug-ins, and all kinds of software - and you get a magazine with them!

 

That’s not quite the end of the story. You may want to look at one page of an OFSTED report, so you end up searching through it on the screen after a long time spent ‘opening it.’ It is much better to save the OFSTED report, or any other PDF file, on your own computer and then peruse it in your own time. This is how you do it:

 

a. When you see a link to a PDF document, DO NOT click on it with the left button: this will open it.

b. Click on the link with the Right button of your mouse

c. Choose ‘Save target as…’ This will save the document the link is ‘pointing’ at to your own computer. You can call the document by a sensible name at this point: OFSTED reports are titled with the school number, and you may never find the file you save unless you give it a clear name!

d. Choose where you want to save it. ‘My Documents’ is the most common location.

e. You will see the ‘download’ process continue for a few minutes. Wait until it has finished, then disconnect from the Internet. Double-click on the file you have saved. It will start up Acrobat Reader and you can look at your document.

 

5 Printing Web Pages

Click on the little icon of a printer on your browser to print out the page, or, better still, choose File > Print which gives you more control. If you have a very slow printer, it’s a good idea to disconnect from the Internet before you start to print. The web page will stay on the screen even though you are off-line, and you will reduce your phone bill. The latest versions of internet Explorer have a useful ‘print preview.’

 

Hints and Tips

 

In this section I have gathered together lots of ‘snippets’ of information which I hope will make your net-life easier. The Internet changes almost weekly, and advice becomes out of date very quickly. It’s a good idea to keep clippings from newspapers and magazines with new addresses and developments, and don’t forget to add new discoveries to your ‘favourites’ or ‘bookmarks.’

 

Five Good Primary English Sites

1. BBC Education Web Guide http://db.bbc.co.uk/education-webguide/pkg_main.p_home

This site should still be the first port of call for any teacher looking for useful curricular materials on the Internet. The BBC has collected an enormous number of useful web links for schools. These are all reviewed and stored in a database. You can select a particular subject, then Adult, Secondary or Primary, and bring up a list of appropriate sites. Looking for ‘Primary English’ in this way produces a list of well over 200. It is also possible to search for a particular word or phrase: ‘Early Years’, or ‘Shakespeare’ and gather a useful collection. 

 

2. The National Grid for Learning (NGfL)  www.vtc.ngfl.gov.uk/resource/literacy
This site is part of the Government’s grand plan to link all schools, colleges, libraries and galleries together in a huge network of resources. It’s not quite there yet, but there is now a lot of useful material on the National Grid. The Literacy section includes useful free software you can download.

 

3. Three Useful Resource sites

The following sites are packed full of really useful lesson material, resources and links for Primary English and Literacy. They are mostly put together by enterprising teachers, sharing material they have created themselves.

http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/index.shtml

http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/index.shtml

http://www.literacyhour.co.uk

Five Ways to Check the Validity of a Web Page

When you look at a book or any other printed document, your prior experience of texts gives you a good idea of its validity or authority even before you start to read. A newspaper is easily distinguished from an academic textbook, or a shopping list! On the Internet, it is less easy to assess whether a document is true, reliable or authoritative. Here are five ways to start checking out a web page:

 

1. Who is the author?

You would usually ignore a paper document if it was anonymous, but many people happily use web pages with no idea of their authorship. If a page is ‘unsigned’ you can safely disregard the information contained in it. One exception to this might be when a page is ‘nested’ inside a site. It’s just a ‘page’ in a ‘book’ and you need to find the ‘title page’ and ‘contents.’ You can often do this by ‘truncating’ the web address, i.e. take words off it and move up through the site until you find out where it is and who has written it. For instance, on my own web site, if you look at this page

            http://business.virgin.net/sound.houses/ks3/sherlock.htm

you will find a review of the ‘text disclosure’ program, Sherlock. That document is inside a folder containing slides about Key Stage 3 Literacy, whose address is:

http://business.virgin.net/sound.houses/ks3/

That in turn is inside my main web site folder,

http://business.virgin.net/sound.houses/

Only on the higher pages will you find my name and details. You can gain a lot of information by ‘chopping back’ web addresses to the next ‘forward slash.’

 

2. Find out about the author

You can next type the author’s name into a search engine and find out who they are, where they come from, and what else they may have written. All this information helps you to assess their reliability as a source of information.

 

3. Where in the world is the page?

Many web sites have a ‘country code,’ e.g. ‘.uk’ for Great Britain, ‘.au’ for Australia, and so on. You won’t find ‘.us’ as America is the birthplace of the Internet and assumes that a web site is in the USA unless otherwise indicated. The web address may also tell you what sort of site you are reading. Look out for ‘.ac’ and ‘.edu’ for academic sites, and ‘.gov’ for official government pages. It is so easy to move from country to country on the Internet that you can easily lose track of where in the ‘real world’ it is you are looking at.

 

4. Find linked sites

If a page is useful and reputable, many people will put links to it on their own sites, giving it a ‘vote of confidence.’ It is possible to find this information about any site. You will need to go to the Search Engine called Altavista (www.altavista.com)  and use the ‘link’ command. This will tell you all the pages which have links ‘pointing at’ a particular web address. This is what you do. Type the word ‘link’ followed by a colon into the search box, then type a web address, e.g.

            link:http://business.virgin.net/sound.houses/

When you click ‘Search,’ Altavista will return a list of linked pages.

 

5. Non-internet information

Always check information you find on the Internet with real life sources such as books. There is a great deal of distortion, propaganda, and misinformation on the Internet, and it is important to check and cross-reference material you find.

 

If you want to pursue these issues further, take a look at an excellent article by Alan November, called ‘Teaching Zack to Think.’ (www.anovember.com)