I'm talking about the problem of discernment. As with printed media if it’s in black and white (or whatever font colour the webpage author has chosen), if it’s printed then it must be true. We are quite careful to select which books we have in our school libraries, use as textbooks, or recommend to our students, so we need to be equally as careful with internet sites.
This is difficult as the web is rather like a Chinese News Wall - anyone can put up whatever they like, and anyone can read it. Many adults develop the ability to differentiate between opinion and ‘fact’, whereas the younger the student, the less able they are to do this.
It’s vital to explain to students before they log on, that not everything that someone says about their own group, or about others, is necessarily true.
What can students do with the Internet?
- Searching the ‘Walled Garden’
As the name suggests this is a restricted area within which students can feel fairly safe. It exists only on the LEOnet server and students’ passwords will not allow them to jump over the wall onto the less secure web at large. The only sites they will be able to visit are those which have been linked into the garden by teachers (teachers’ passwords allow free access to the whole web - never divulge your password to anyone - especially not to a student).
Students can use LEOnet’s search engine to search the walled garden for information they want. This is done using ‘keywords’ from the information they want to find. For example if you are looking for information on Christianity, then typing the word will present you with a list of all the sites which contain that word. Typing several keywords together allows you to be more specific, e.g. “communion catholic”. Unless there’s a specific name you are looking for use lower case when searching. Search engines also exist outside the walled garden - see the glossary page for more information on these.
This does all depend on the relevant sites being put there by teachers. First of all make a note of what’s in the garden which is of relevance to what you are teaching, then go out of the garden and search for other relevant sites which you judge to be of use to your students and add them to the garden. See the glossary page to find out how to do this.
The beauty of the walled garden is that the students know that the relevant information is there, because you put it there! The Internet can be a great time waster, especially in the hands of students who can easily be led off to cul-de-sacs and irrelevant sites. By using the garden in this way, you’ve done all the time wasting for them!
Knowing which sites are available to them, you can then set appropriate ‘finding out’ tasks for them to complete. Using text and graphics (see below) from the various sites, students can then incorporate them into their own work and present it either on the computer or printed out for display.
- Plagiarism
I expect many teachers have had the experience of being handed work which shows evidence of blatant copying from ‘Encarta’ or some other CD Rom. If the work is word-processed the student may simply have copied a whole chunk of text from the CD into their document, and ten to one they haven’t even read it! Exactly the same thing could happen with information they find on websites.
It’s important to nip this practice in the bud as early as possible. Copying someone else’s work and passing it off as your own is theft. Younger students may not even realise that this is what they’ve done.
The way to deal with this is by insisting that students acknowledge the sources for their work and use quotation marks where a phrase has been lifted word for word. I suggest putting a limit on how long such quotations should be - no more than two or three lines, for example. Unlike ‘Encarta’, if a student is using the walled garden, you should be able to recognise when something has been copied.
There is now an etiquette for quoting Internet resources in published works, but you could probably work out something simpler for your students - just the webpage author’s name if it appears and a brief site name. Webpage addresses can be very long and often change, so there is no need to quote “http://www...” etc
- How to grab text
(See entry about plagiarism above before doing this)
There are several ways to grab text from a webpage:
- Once you’ve found the bit of text you want, use the mouse to highlight it on the webpage (it
should reverse colour when you do this).
Click on the Edit menu at the top of the browser, click on Copy, and the text is copied into the computer’s temporary memory.
Open up your word-processor, click on Edit, then Paste. The text should appear in your wp document.
Try it with some of the text on this page!
You’ll probably find that the text has line-breaks in odd places and doesn’t fill the page - which means there’s probably a return press at the end of each line which you will need to delete. I usually use ‘Find and Replace’ in my wp to do this.
- You can save the whole page as text (but you won’t get the pictures with it).
In the File menu at the top of the browser, click on ‘Save As...’, and a dialogue box will appear.
First choose the folder where you want to save the text.
In the ‘Save as type:’ box, use the drop down menu to select ‘*.txt’
Don’t forget to change the ‘htm’ file extension to ‘txt’.
Click on Save and it’s done.
When you want to open it in your word processor, don’t forget to open files of the ‘txt’ type. As with the method above the text will have line-breaks in odd places and not fill the page.
- Some writing on webpages may look like ordinary text, but you’ll find you can’t highlight it with
your mouse. This is because it’s actually a scanned picture of text, and not typed directly into the
webpage. To save this kind of text see grabbing pictures below.
- Once you’ve found the bit of text you want, use the mouse to highlight it on the webpage (it
should reverse colour when you do this).
- How to grab pictures
Place your mouse over the picture you want to save, press the RIGHT mouse button, and a pop up menu will appear.
Click on ‘Save Image As...’ and a dialogue box will appear.
Choose the folder where you want to save the picture, and press Save.
- How to use pictures
Once you’ve saved a picture you may want to play around with it before putting it into your document. You may want to make it face the other way, reduce its size, change the colours, erase part of it, etc. etc. - the possibilities are endless.
To do this you will need a graphics program. In my opinion the best one is Paint Shop Pro 5 which you can download and purchase from the net. The program is shareware and the evaluation version only works for a limited time after which you must purchase it.
Images you save from the web can be in a number of different formats, which you can tell from their file extensions: .jpg or .jpeg, .gif, .bmp, .tif or .tiff, .wmf are the most common ones.
Not all word processing or desk top publishing programs recognise every type of picture file, so you can use the graphics program to open it and save it as a different picture type. Paint Shop Pro recognises virtually all the types of file you are likely to come across.
- Desk Top Publishing, Word Processing
and Time Wasting! An unbelievable amount of time is wasted by students through the incorrect use of these programs - the more sophisticated they are, the more time can be wasted! It’s all to do with the order in which they do things. You could explain it like this - One doesn’t construct a container before one has decided what to put in it (this was the mistake they made with the Millenium Dome!) The ‘fun’ bits like selecting fonts, colours, alignment, inserting pictures etc. are the least important and should be done LAST, after the student has typed the text.
Here’s a suggested order for presenting work using these programs:
- Assemble the information needed to complete the work - books, web text, web pictures etc.
- Using a simple word processor such as WordPad (which comes with every Windows95 computer
and can be found in the Accessories folder on the Start Menu) type in the text.
- Just type the text with simple carriage returns at the end of titles and paragraphs - DON’T
choose fonts, colours, alignment etc. just type the text. Students may hate this, but trust me, it’s
the best way!
- Save it as it is in its raw state under two different names - if you muck one up later on, you can
always go back to the original text saved under the other name (make a note of which is
which!).
- When, and ONLY when the piece of work is finished, should it be enhanced with pictures and
formatting. From the simple word processor you can select all of the text by highlighting it with the
mouse, and clicking on Copy in the Edit menu. Close WordPad and now and ONLY now, open
your fancy Desk Top Publishing or Word98 program. Go to the Edit menu, click on Paste and the
raw text will appear. Now the students can do what they want with it - centre titles, use bullets,
choose fonts and colours, insert pictures, etc. And if it all goes horribly wrong, they can delete it all
and paste in the raw text again from the other copy of the WordPad file they saved earlier.
- Assemble the information needed to complete the work - books, web text, web pictures etc.
- Four of the most useful short cuts in the world!
When using the Internet, word processing, and desk top publishing, you’re going to be doing a lot of copying and pasting. The following short cuts work with most programs and I find it saves a lot of menu clicking:
- Copying [Control c]
Highlight the text you want with the mouse, then whilst holding down the Control key, press the letter c.That text is now held in the computer’s memory and can be pasted into any document in any program. The memory is temporary and empties itself when you switch off the machine, or gets replaced when you highlight and copy something else.
- Pasting [Control v]
Position your cursor at the point in the document where you want to paste the text you’ve copied, and whilst holding down the Control key, press the letter v. The copied text will now appear in your document.- Cutting and Copying (moving text) [Control x]
This works in the same way as copying, except that the text you highlight is cut from the original and saved into the computer’s temporary memory for you to paste where you want.
N.B. You can copy text from a webpage to paste somewhere else, but you can’t cut it or edit it on the webpage itself.- Highlighting all the text on a page [Control a]
Rather than using the mouse to highlight all the text on a very long page, which might take a while scrolling down, you can simply hold down Control and press the letter a, and all the text will be highlighted for you to copy.Notice how the three main editing keys x c v appear next to each other on the bottom row of the keyboard:
- Control and
- x is for cutting
- c is for copying
- v is for pasting
- c is for copying
- Copying [Control c]
