Live From Mars was active July 1996-December 1997.
Using Electronic Mail to Stay Current
An email service called maillist is available from the LFM project. If
you join this free service
you will get mail several times a week that is germane to the
classroom project.
The mail will include three things: updates from the LFM 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-lfm
list. Also, some
of the journals will be written at the 5th/6th grade language
level.
Web: http://passporttoknowledge.com/lfm
Email Tools Defined
Mail List
Journals
Q&A Database
There develops a question and answer database that teachers can access.
This would be
text traffic that you would get off the Internet. You
could go to a
Gopher site, FTP site, or World Wide Web site. One of the ways I use the
Q&A database is
to have the kids pose questions that they are interested in getting
answered. Then after school I
sort the questions by how I think they can be answered:
Once questions are in their respective piles, I get online. Once at the
Q&A database, I have been known to 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
Strong student response to the email traffic for the Q&Q
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 database 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 Live From
Antarctica 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.
Three 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 nonproportional font or too large text point size. Because of this I
allocated time to clean
up the text format so there were no broken lines, etc. 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 two
computers with
modems, or their skills were limited to AOL. I was using my most robust
Internet
account to handle the email traffic, but the interface was
difficult for the kids
to use. So at times I would forward the students' mail to their AOL
accounts where they
could access their mail on their own time.
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Introduction to Electronic Field Trips
Email Tools
Written by Scott Coletti, Middle School teacher
Crittenden Middle School, Mtn.View, CA.
Please send suggestions or comments to scolett@quest.arc.nasa.gov
One of the ways that you and your kids can stay current about 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-lfm) 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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