Internet news you can use
January 1997

Worth a thousand words. With an astounding 60,000 works of art available for viewing online, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco claim to have assembled the world's largest searchable art image database on the web. And who are we to argue? Here your students will find tons of beautiful and significant art -- from Wassily Kandinsky to Andy Warhol. The high-quality images are available in a choice of three different resolutions, and they're just a mouse click away. The site also includes teachers' guides and resources for educators. It was for sites like this that the web was made.

Pay to play. Scholastic Network, formerly on America Online, has set up a new shop on the web, with plenty of original instructional material, projects, and games in the areas of language arts, math, social studies, and science. The site's emphasis is on interactivity and freshly updated content rather than on extensive depth of information. There's also a teacher center, discussion boards, live chat, and a guide to the web with site reviews by educators. The connection is speedy, and the site is easy to navigate for the most part. Unfortunately, you have to pay to enjoy the service: The yearly fee is $199 for a single account or $1,995 for a school site license. There's an area for nonsubscribers, too, but it's mostly just a sales pitch extravaganza for Scholastic products. Luckily, there's a free 30-day trial, so you can try the service out before you buy.

Help is at hand. Technology planning got you down? Now there's a web site where school administrators and teachers can find tools and resources to help plan, implement, and evaluate technology in schools: Planet Innovation. A product of the South Central Regional Technology Consortium and the University of Missouri College of Education, the Planet Innovation web site offers numerous sophisticated online planning tools to assist you in your task as technology planner. Highlights include a technology cost estimator, a collaboration tool to help your group work together, a decision analysis tool to help you weigh different courses of action, and searchable databases of technology innovations, technology plans, syllabi, and computer lab configurations. Here you'll also find a software library, an employee locator, discussion boards, and a computer lab scheduling tool to help you get the most out of your school's investment. Users must register to gain access, but registration is free. There's a lot here, and it's well worth a visit.

You've just been relocated. If someone you never met built you a new house without asking if you wanted to live there, and if people starting going there to visit you, would you give up and move in? That's the big question mark at the American School Directory, the product of a marketing vision so grand it took IBM's now-idle Olympic games web server to hold it all. Billed as "The Internet Home for All K-12 Schools," this meta-site is from the folks at Computers for Education, whose main business is selling magazine subscriptions through schools. With IBM, Apple, and Vanderbuilt University on board, Computers for Education has built home pages for every school in the country -- 106,000 in all. Basic information about each school has already been entered, but the idea is for schools to move in and make the home page their own, taking advantage of ready-made fund-raising opportunities to benefit the schools (and Computers for Education). Free web-based e-mail for students, teachers, and parents is provided, too. Will schools abandon their existing web sites in favor of the American School Directory, will they maintain dual households, or will they simply ignore their new and unsolicited homes? A lot of marketing dollars are hanging in the balance.

Standards and links. Web sites that attempt to organize and link to some of the best education resources on the Internet are a dime a dozen, but every now and then a new idea surfaces. Connections+, a web site from McREL (the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory), provides links to lesson plans, activities, and curriculum resources on the web, but what's different is that the site groups the resources together with related subject-area content standards. This way, you can easily take a look at some suggested educational outcomes as you decide which resources to use. The site can be a little confusing to navigate as you move back and forth between the resource links and the content standards, but the idea is a fresh approach that makes sense.