The Primary English Encyclopedia: The Heart of the Curriculum, Third Edition
See also e-mail, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and English, interactive white boards
The Internet is a world wide web linking information sites electronically to provide users with a mammoth database. It provides great opportunities for teachers and children to use it as a powerful resource for finding out about all manner of information to support learning.
The Internet provides much to enrich English lessons: reviews of children’s fiction and non-fiction both print and electronic; biographies of children’s authors and many activity sites. There are also opportunities to share good practice. Primary National Strategy are piloting work with interactive white boards and other integrated technologies so that teachers can now use film, still pictures, sound and music from the Internet to enliven learning.
Children need help not only to access information competently and swiftly, but also to use the material they find. Elspeth Scott’s booklet Managing the Internet (2000) which focuses on the Internet as a whole-school, cross-curricular resource advises about this.
When it comes to search engines many children find http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/ user-friendly. The children’s version of the Ask Jeeves search engine www.ajkids.com can deal with whole questions.
Increasingly children are using the Internet at home as well as at school (Burnett and Wilkinson, 2005). Sixty-four per cent of British families with three to four year olds had a computer at home and 84 per cent of these parents said their child used the computer at home (Young People and ICT, 2003, see http://becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/full_report.pdf). BECTA concludes that British children are big Internet users compared with those in other parts of the world including Europe. Safety guidelines are on the BECTA site: www.becta.org.uk
We must remember that while technology can make possible some valuable learning experiences children also need to learn from interaction with other human beings. We are still developing a set of principles to guide the design of educational sites. Wyse and Jones (2007) suggest that a high quality of interaction is a feature of a good site for children. The BBC Teletubbies site, for example, included visual images, sound and speech and encouraged young children to investigate: ‘Who spilled the Tubby custard?’
Teachers and children can add to the net as well as gaining information from it by creating a school website. (Software packages like Web Workshop Iona Software can guide this.) Some school websites serve the same purpose as a school prospectus while others offer web browser display boards showing children’s work. The latter provide opportunities for sharing between schools and are often an incentive for children to write to others, perhaps in other parts of the country or in other lands. Schools are increasingly using networks like European SchoolNet and Commonwealth Electronic Network.
Burnett, C. and Wilkinson, J. (2005) ‘Holy Lemons! Learning from Children’s uses of the internet in out-of-school contexts, in Literacy, 39, (2), pp. 158–165.
Commonwealth Electronic Network http://www.col.org/cense
European SchoolNet http://www.eun.org
Scott, Elspeth (2000) Managing the Internet School Library Association and Reading and Language Information Centre.
Virtual Museums: www.cultureonline.gov.uk
Wyse, Dominic and Jones, Russell (2007) Teaching English, Language and Literacy London: Routledge.
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