An email service is available from the HST project called a maillist. If you join this service (it's free) you will get mail several times a week that is germane to the classroom project. The mail will include 3 things: updates from the HST team offering resources for the classroom teacher; field journals from the staff, scientists, students, and teachers involved in the project; a discussion carried on by anyone joining the Discuss-HST list. Also, some of the journals will be written down to the 5th/6th grade language level.
Web: http://passporttoknowledge.com/hst
EMAIL TOOLS DEFINED
MAIL LIST
JOURNALS
Q AND A DATABASE
There develops a question and answer data base that teachers can access. This would be
text traffic that you would go out to get off the Internet somewhere. You might go to a
Gopher site, FTP site, or World Wide Web site. One of the ways I use the QandA database is
to have the kids pose questions that they are interested in getting answered. Then after school I
sort the q's by how I think they can be answered:
Once questions are in their respective piles, I get online. Once at the project question and
answer data base, I have been known to just download the whole thing to my computer for
perusal by me and the kids off line. Also, I have gone through and matched up my
students' questions with any answers already posted.
STRONG STUDENT RESPONSE TO EMAIL TRAFFIC
Strong student response to the email traffic for the question and answer
database was observed. One surprise was how strongly the students demanded daily
email traffic checks. Each day, first thing in the door...
Another thing I did with the data base was use recurring words to run searches on the
Internet (Lycos, Web Crawler, etc.). That way I generated additional
resource lists related to the projects. Of course, during the LFA trip the kids found and
used some servers from Australia and New Zealand to get resources for their product (in
that case the product was a slide show produced in ClarisWorks 2.0 or jigsawed team
teaching). They also generated email traffic using the email links whose pages they used
for their reports. This activity generated a great deal of interest from the students.
3 ways for Packaging Email Traffic
Another way to get the email to the kids was to make multiple disk copies. The time
involved with this task was much more than using the copy machine. Although I will say
that the kids related positively to being handed a disk with material differently than being
handed paper.
The third way was to send the file out over the network in the Mac lab. Yes, I teach in a
Mac lab all day. Of course after downloading the email traffic of whatever sort, I had to
tweak the file, usually because some contributors to the email stream did not understand
how to get clean copy into an email message. They used too many columns, or a non
proportional font or too large text point size. Because of this fact I allocated time to clean
up the text format so there were no broken lines, orphans, and such. Of course an entire
forest was saved because I stripped out the email headers before replicating the files.
Another way I tried to handle the email was to get kids to go pick it up themselves. Of
course the students who were expecting traffic were never on the 2 computers with
modems. Or their skills were limited to AOL. I was using my most robust Internet
account to handle the email traffic. It was robust but the interface was difficult for the kids
to use. So at times I would forward the students' mail to their AOL accounts. Then they
could access their mail on their own time.
|Email Tools
|Reading List
| The Fundamental Tools |
One of the ways that you and your kids can stay abreast of events during the project is to
join a group of interested people on a type of email service that looks like a group
newsletter service. Everything that anybody writes to one common address is published
and sent to the people on a list. This type of email is called a maillist. In other words, a
maillist is an automatic server (server definition link) of any email traffic generated by those
people on the list. The automatic server sends each list member all the mail sent to the
server. Some maillists (like updates-HST) do not allow everybody to send messages but
instead limit the sender to a select group of people.
Those on the project doing the support, science, and content provide periodic "Journals"
and "Junior Journals" of their activities. The journal traffic is rich in content and, perhaps
even more importantly, the process of doing science.
(By the way, using this traffic is a great way to gain a feel for the culture developing
around a project.)
Teacher's Note-(This task is a great reason to have students transcribe questions
into an electronic file. The questions can then be copied, edited, and uploaded with
ease)
One of the issues I had to struggle with was how to package email traffic to the kids. My
use of paper was limited by the fact that a rationing system is in place on campus, and I did
not want to use up what little allocation I had.
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