This section gives a sample from the range of activities available to members. These could be used with a class, each making use of a particular aspect of the Internet or using resources from specific websites.
Using the Internet in the classroom
At the moment the vast bulk of Website material emanates from America; this is not to suggest that the material is in any way inferior (some of the best English literature resource sites are US university based) - but the culture on which it is based, the assumptions it makes and the language it uses is US rather than UK orientated, and it is well to bear this in mind. The number of UK websites is growing very fast, and there are certainly a huge number of sites which will keep English studies sufficiently busy with excellent home-grown material. We should also remember that one of the strengths of the Internet is its global nature - resources could originate from any country, culture or creed, and it would be very short sighted to limit access only to UK sites. The real problem is, as ever, sorting out the useful stuff from the bad or really awful.
The other serious problem which schools should address before giving students access to the Net is of course the danger of them viewing material which might be regarded by some as inappropriate in the sense of the school being 'in loco parentis'. Censorship is always a difficult issue for teachers, but more so in this case of the Internet where there is no control of, or responsibility for the content and views which might be found.
Students, by their nature, will try to find the stuff they are not supposed to look at, and it is also very easy for them to come across 'uncomfortable' material on websites which at first sight seem quite innocuous or whose title belies their actual content. Although it might be difficult to avoid the Internet dross altogether, there are certain strategies which might keep it to a minimum. There are, for instance, are a number of ways of 'filtering' material by using programs such as 'net-nannies' or 'walled-garden' sites, but the best and most effective way is intelligent supervision by staff. This is not the place to rehearse all the possible supervisory methods available, but it is vital that the school devises some kind of practical policy for Internet access in order to safeguard staff and students from possible difficulties which might arise from such access.
One such way is to limit the work to specific projects which need access for material only from known sites whose content is reliable. The following suggested projects use this technique, and provided that the Websites to be visited are held in a Bookmark or Favorite file, then the students have no reason to visit elsewhere. If it does become necessary to link off to sites outside of those bookmarked, then this is where direct supervision might be appropriate. (The session supervisor can always check the sites visited during an online session by clicking on the browser's 'Go' button, and a list of them will be displayed! The 'History' button on Internet Explorer will also list all the sites recently visited)
The down-side of this approach is of course that the teacher devising or running the projects needs to put together the list of required sites - yet more time to be found!
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