CMCM LOGO CMC Magazine / Volume 2, Number 6 / June 1, 1995 / Page 10


"Don't Tease the Orangutans"
A Sampler of Fun and Educational Web Sites

by Kirsten Cooke (cookek@rpi.edu)

It's a cold, gray day out and the kids are behaving like orangutans in the zoo. You try and make them read their chemistry textbook and work some problems, but instead they insist on playing "make the teacher crazy." You wish that there was a way to get them to pay attention, but can't come up with one other than committing hari-kari using a bunsen burner.

Using the World Wide Web, you could probably come up with something amusing and educational enough to satisfy both you and your band of orangutans. Need some motion? Send them to the MATHMOL site to watch water molecules push and pull each other around. Need violence? Send them to the interactive Frog Dissection Tutorial, where they can hack away at pictures of slimy dead frogs and watch movies of little froggy hearts beating.

These are just two of the amazing resources that are available on the Web. Instead of listing sites individually, I have pulled together some of the best "gateways" to educational resources.

General

Science

English/Literature

For kids of all ages

Now all you have to do is get access . . .

OK. So you showed the school board all these cool resources on the Web, but they're too stuffy to recognize a good thing when it's biting them on the nose. It's time to bring on the heavy artillery: shower them with papers from the education section of the Second WWW Conference '94 or success stories of computers in the classroom from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's EdWeb Project. Still not convinced? Try the old standby "But everyone else is doing it. . . ." and send them to the extensive list of Webby schools at the Web 66 site. This site also has a nice set of instructions on how to set up your own Web server, so once you convince the Board to spend the money, you can get right to work on setting up your system. -

Kirsten Cooke is a Master's student in Technical Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And nothing else.

Copyright © 1995 by Kirsten Cooke. All Rights Reserved.


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