Web Seach Strategies for Educators

• Scout Report - brought to you by InterNIC, the Internet Network Information Center from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this weekly report brings you synopses of a handful of interesting new sites. There is an education section and a general section. The Scout Report gives you a manageable dose of good sites with descriptions. You can receive the report as e-mail or visit their web site and search current and past reports.

  You may also want to check the K.I.D.S. site at InterNIC: kids from four schools selecting and annotating their favorite web sites. They have also developed a Site Selection Criteria list that is worth a look.

• Net-Happenings - Also from InterNIC, Net-Happenings is for information gluttons. This service posts listings several times a day. The postings are a compilation of messages sent to Net-Happenings announcing new web resources and tools. They are listed by category, K-12, GOVT, RESOUR, LISTS, MISC, etc. Join the e-mail list if you want to get your postings as they come out, or visit the web page to search for past postings and browse them at your leisure. When you are ready to publicize your own web site, don't forget to send a note to Net-Happenings. Sites announced there get into most web search indexers.

  In keeping with the never-stand-still spirit of the web, a K-12 spin off of NET-HAPPENINGS has just been announced. It's name is k12net-hap. Subscribe by sending e-mail to:
  k12lists@rrnet.com
  No message is needed. Just use as the subject line of the message:
  subscribe k12net-hap

Let Your Fingers do the Talking

One of the best ways to stay informed about new events and sites on the web is by joining a discussion group. There are discussion groups on a variety of topics related to education. Generally, you subscribe to a group by sending an e-mail message to that groups' subscription program. Once subscribed you can then send and receive messages from the group. How do you find out the groups' names and subscription information? On the web, of course. Here are some lists of lists:

• Diane Kovacs' Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences - the comprehensive guide to scholarly discussion groups, this site lets you search for a discussion group by keyword, subject, or name. It describes each group, and provides contact and subscription information.

• Educational Mailing Lists for Teachers - education lists drawn from the larger list maintained by Pitsco, Inc..

• Global SchoolNet lists - a short list of popular school-related discussion groups.

Searching for Specifics

In addition to the Web Guides mentioned above, a number of services are involved in indexing web sites. Once indexed, the site is visible to search engines. You can use these search engines to find information at the sites. Also, many people have collected their own topic-based web lists. Finding a dependable source like this can save you hours of searching.

• Global Searching - These services allow you to type in a keyword, phrase, or concept. It then searches through all the sites that it has indexed and returns a list of all the web pages that contain items matching your search. In a web of millions of pages, learning how to refine your search is crucial. For example, imagine the number of results you might get if you searched for the single word "cookie." One search engine found 114, 913 web pages that included that word. They ranged from cookie recipes to companies that sold cookies to a computer game with that word in the title to a restaurant to a technical definition of the word as it's used in UNIX...you get the point.

  Some of the global search engines are:
  AltaVista, a service from Digital Equipment Corp. and one of the largest; Excite, which allows you to search by keyword or concept from a global list or reviewed list; WebCrawler, which has also indexed many sites; and, Starting Point, which searches a collection of other search engines all at once.

  Others can be found at Netscape's home site by clicking on the "Net Search" button in your Netscape browser or by pointing your browser to: http://www.netscape.com/home/internet-search.html.

• Net Guides - Some services categorize sites for you, allowing you to find a limited number of sites by subject. In some cases you can also search globally. The advantage is that you are not faced with the daunting task of sifting through thousands of sites. The disadvantage is that you may miss perfectly good sites because you do not categorize them exactly as the organizers do. Yahoo is one of the most well-known. It reviews sites, assigns them to a category, and lets you navigate or search what it has found. Take a look at Lycos, which does both global and topic searching and highlights the top sites rated by their sister company, Point. Another more recent Net Guide is Albert 2 which promises "original educational content." The education section is small but has some interesting links. Some Net Guides not only describe sites but rate them as well. The Argus Clearinghouse is such a one as is Magellan.

• Websters Choice - Many people collect and publish their favorite list of sites. Try searching on the phrases like "web sites for educators" or "web sites for teachers" or "educational resources." Check the date on the lists you find. Chances are if it has not been updated recently then the owner will not be keeping it up to date in the future. Once you have found several promising lists, bookmark them for future use. You will also find collections of topic-specific lists that can provide good resources.

In Touch with Vermont

Vermont educators are alive and well on the web. Some of the places to visit are:

• Vermont State Web
• Vermont Department of Education
• Vermont Educational Telecommunications Consortium
• Vermont Institute for Science, Mathematics and Technology
• Vermont Interactive Television
• Vermont NEA
• Vermont Principals' Association
• Vermont School Boards Association
• Vermont State Technology Council
• Vermont Technology Education Association

Creating Your Own Web Space

Connecting with people and finding great resources are two important pieces of the web triangle. The third is the opportunity it provides for creating your own web space. There are many ways to use it: create a page for your class where you provide links to specific web resources; pages for homework assignments, readings, class notes, and event announcements; let your students be creative and publish their own web projects; if information is being created and distributed in paper it might as well be done on the web.

You do not need to actually be connected to the web to create and use web pages. Your pages can be created and viewed on your stand-alone PC. These pages will not be published and available to the rest of the world, but they can be a good starting point to learning how to create for the web.

To publish to the web so that you, your students, parents, community members and the world at large can see your pages, you will need a computer connected to the Internet either through a network or through a modem, and space on a web server. This server can be available through your Internet Provider or you may wish to consider getting an account with VETC. The Vermont Educational Telecommunications Consortium makes server space available to Vermont schools for their web pages. It also has a grant program that supports summer institutes where teachers can learn to use Internet technology, including creating web sites, for their schools. For a look at last summer's institute, see VETC Summer Institutes 1996. Information about this summer's programs, as well as a revamped VETC web site, will be available soon. (For a sneak preview of the work in progress see VETC DRAFT WEB SITE.)

Also available at VETC is a tutorial for creating web pages. This is but one of many such tutorials across the web. Many new tools are being developed to make web page creation easier. If you want to take the plunge now is the time!

Created by Hope Greenberg, e-mail: Hope.Greenberg@uvm.edu. Last update: 15 April 1997.