Use of the Internet in Education

PASSWORD>aamjT37qc5iCc: I am researching the extent to which the Internet is used in the
: education of children with mild learning disability and would love
: to hear from anyone who has carried out Internet based projects in
: the classroom. Also if teachers are not using the Internet as a
: tool–why not? Any comments/ideas would be welcomed, Thanks,
: FidelmaThe Internet currently doesn’t have too much that serves to either remediate the skills mildly LD folks need help with, or address their LD’s — there’s an awful lot of READING involved. Mostly I have seen Internet “projects” as a resource=room busy-work thing where students got to practice their handwriting copying.As a tool for teachers who want to learn more about *effective* ways to teach, it’s great — go to LD In Depth on this site and start reading! (Unless that’s just for grade school students to do…)

: Many of my students have mild learning disabilities but our school does not direct itself to remediation of their learning disabilities really. My answer to your good question then might not be the one you’re looking for. I would think the Internet would serve any student in the modern world well, mild learning disabilities or not. I’m also not sure if it’s fair to say that my projects are Internet-based but I certainly use the net often.I have a device which connects my monitor/computer to a large screen television in my room so I can go online and show my students various things. For a celebration of the Chinese New Year, I displayed a website that came complete with Chinese music playing over my speakers and showed a picture of a traditional celebration. For a class on different language, I went to websites that had the Maori language being spoken outloud on the site and another the Sioux language. For a class on poetry, there are sites where the authors of the poems have been recorded reading their poems. Next week I’m teaching the theory of evolution and we’ll go to a site that has a video clip of the purported transition between species. Last week we all went to a site put out by the government where all the aerial photographs are and they each searched(successfully) for an aerial photograph of the house on the Internet!I often having students looking for information on-line. My school has a “family filter” which makes it less likely that they’ll bump into some of the inappropriate sites. We recently did a unit on different cultures and the children did all of their research on their assigned culture on the Internet. Going on-line and doing a search is certainly a much more rewarding kind of research than is the old “look it up in a book.” For kids with learning disabilities especially reading disabilities, the arduous process of looking up information in several books - that may or may not prove helpful - is counterproductive. They often get lost in the research.One project that was fully Internet based was that each student went to their own last name.com to see who had the site as we talked about how the world had been divided up by the explorers in the 16th century. They could see how their name site had already been claimed by someone just as land in the 1600s was claimed even though it might have already belonged to someone else. Right now in another class our students are making their own websites.In the near future, we hope to have all assigned homework on a site that students could go on to at night to check their work.We use the Internet in many different ways but each of the ways has been great.Schools have been too isolated from the society they’re supposed to serve.I am researching the extent to which the Internet is used in the
: education of children with mild learning disability and would love
: to hear from anyone who has carried out Internet based projects in
: the classroom. Also if teachers are not using the Internet as a
: tool–why not? Any comments/ideas would be welcomed, Thanks,
: Fidelma