Connected Classroom Conferences

Meet other professionals in connected classrooms. Learn from others and get new ideas for your classroom.
* Boston, MA,10/29-30, 1999,The Seaport Hotel at the World Trade Center
* Long Beach, CA, 11/10-13, 1999, Hyatt Regency Long Beach
* Houston, TX,12/1-2, 1999,Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel
* Atlanta, GA,12/10-11, 1999,Hyatt Regency and the America's Mart
* Chicago, IL,2/16-19, 2000, Hyatt Regency McCormick Place
* New York, NY,2/25-26, 2000,Grand Hyatt New York
* Philadelphia, PA,3/9-11, 2000,Philadelphia Marriot
* Minneapolis, MN, 4/7-8, 2000,Radisson Hotel South & Plaza Tower
Visit http//www.classroom.com/conferences/ to learn more.

SchoolGrants

SchoolGrants offers state, federal, and foundation grant funding opportunities for U.S. K-12 schools. Also available on this free site are grant-writing hints and a number of links of interest to teachers and administrators. Find the site at http//www.schoolgrants.org

Y2K Problem solved!

"Our staff has completed the 18 months of work on time and on budget. We have gone through every line of code in every program in every system. We have analyzed all databases, all data files, including backups and historic archives, and modified all data to reflect the change.
We are proud to report that we have completed the "Y-to-K" date change mission, and have now implemented all changes to all programs and all data to reflect your new standards
Januark, Februark, March, April, Mak, June, Julk, August, September, October, November, December
As well as
Sundak, Mondak, Tuesdak, Wednesdak, Thursdak, Fridak, Saturdak
I trust that this is satisfactory, because to be honest, none of this Y to K problem has made any sense to me. But I understand it is a global problem, and our team is glad to help in any way possible.
And what does the year 2000 have to do with it? Speaking of which, what do you think we ought to do next year when the two-digit year rolls over from 99 to 00? We'll await your direction."
- Does this mean we'll have to reteach our kids the correct spelling?

Searching the Vastness
of the Internet

If the title makes searching the Internet sound like a formidable task, it should. The World Wide Web is an incredibly vast (nearly 1 billion pages by some estimates) resource. A few short years ago, one search engine, HotBot, had managed to actually catalog over a third of the pages out there. As the competition amongst search engines has increased, their cataloged range has decreased and decreased dramatically. To add to the difficulty, many of the search engines now seem more concerned with becoming your portal or start page than with actually getting web sites cataloged and organized for easy and useful searching.  A recent study by two researchers at the NEC Research Institute, Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, shows that the search engine with the biggest coverage of pages, NorthernLight, only covers 16% of the web while HotBot has fallen to fourth place in coverage with 11.3% of pages indexed. The top 11 engines, in order of coverage are: 1) NorthernLight, 2) Snap, 3) AltaVista, 4) HotBot, 5) Microsoft, 6)InfoSeek, 7) Google, 8) Yahoo, 9) Excite, 10) Lycos, and 11) EuroSeek.  But what do the numbers really mean? Do we want a search engine that indexes the whole World Wide Web (or WWWW)? Do we want Suzy's picture of her pet dog to be indexed alongside the holdings of the Smithsonian Institute? Should the (in)famous girls dorm room in Florida web site be indexed along with other famous places like Cape Canaveral? It would be wonderful to just have the useful site indexed but who decides what's useful and what's not?  No matter how sophisticated the algorithms for ranking and indexing sites, the most important aspect of a search engine is its user-friendliness. For that, HotBot continues to top our list of search engines. If you want to customize your search, the tools for doing so are right there in the left margin. You don't have to click any buttons to go to an "Advanced" search which sounds to sophisticated for us common folk. Two other favorites are NorthernLight with its custom search folders and Google with its "I'm feeling lucky" button that takes you directly to the number one ranked site for your search.  If we add the human element back into the equation (along with spiders and complex mathematical formulas) we end up with endeavors such as the Mining Co. / About collection of web sites put together as guides created by people who are specialists in their fields and collect and update information about their specialty.  Our conclusion? It might be best NOT to have a search engine that indexes the whole web. After all how many English speakers want to read a computer support page in Japanese? Or run a search for taxes and end up at a pornography website (as happened at Educyber in March). It's also important for each of us to remember that the search engine we're using at the moment is just a small snapshot of pages available on the web.

WEB SITE REVIEWS

Free Things for Educators!

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Oaks/9122/

It's time for teachers and students to go back to school. This month's feature site might help you get ready for the new school year. Created by an educator who knows the limitation of classroom funds and supplies, the site posts various links to websites that offer free educational materials. The links are organized according to age groups (Preschool, K-5, 6-8, 9-12 grades ) and they can also be searched by subject. Offers vary from a free CD-ROM to a free recipe for homemade stickers. You can subscribe to their mailing list and receive new information via Email whenever there is an update. Go visit the site and see if you can find some help for your class for free!

PBS TeacherSource

The Good, Clean Funnies List

Ask Ed Cyber

Q. Ed, I just got on the Internet and love it. My problem though is my sister also loves it. We've only got one email account. Sharing email isn't working, especially when my girlfriend writes. What should we do?   -Lacking Privacy

A. Dear Mr. Privacy,
Getting additional email accounts is easy. I've got about 10 myself. The first thing you should do is check with your Internet Service Provider
(ISP). Most ISP's will let you have anywhere from two to ten email accounts for the same basic rate you pay now. If they do let you have more than one account, I recommend using Netscape 4.6 to set up the different accounts as it is easy to use with different accounts.  If you're ISP doesn't provide extra email accounts, don't despair. There are literally hundreds of web sites that provide something called web-based mail. Visit Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) or Hotmail (www.hotmail.com), fill out the online form (takes only a few minutes) and voila, you've got mail!  Web-based mail is convenient even if you have an account from your ISP because you can access it from any computer that has Internet access. You don't have to go through the setup process each time or lose sleep worrying about whether you are DHCP or Static and whether your DNS is correct.  What's your girlfriend writing that's so secret anyway?  - Ed

Q. Everytime I write a letter in Word, I get all these red and green squiggly lines under words.  I know it's the spell checker and grammar checker but I also run the spell checker when I'm finished and the grammar checker seems kind of dumb.  So here's my question:  Can I turn off those squiggles and if so, how?

A. Those lines can interrupt the creative juices while writing.  Fortunately it's easy to turn that automatic checking off.  Click on the Tools menu and select Options.  Click on the Spelling & Grammar tab.  Uncheck (by clicking on the check) the boxes marked "Check spelling as you type" and "Check grammar as you type." Or, for those readers who've got it turned off and want to turn it on, check the unchecked boxes.  When a word is not in the Microsoft dictionary automatic spell checking underlines the word.  You can then right click the word for possible alternatives or to tell it to ignore the word.  You can even add often used words (school or company names for example) to the custom dictionary.