See the Sites
These sites offer additional information on communications and technology.
- USA.Gov – This site has a list of links to many well-developed sites for children, including Cyberethics for Kids, Kidz Privacy, an NSA page on cryptography, Girls Go Tech and many others. You can also find links to lists of science and math sites and other recommended resources.
- Imagine Mars – Imagine Mars is a participatory project for teachers to conduct with students. Provides lesson plans, Mars facts and other resources to lead student project teams.
- Space Science Education Resource Directory -A collection of educational resources produced by NASA’s Space Science Education and Public Outreach Program.
- The website of the Computer History Museum in California – It offers online exhibits of the history of computing as well as facts about the development of the Internet.
- Rice University’s website on nanotechnology, an important but little-known concept that will soon be infiltrating our lives. It offers a fun kids’ site that teaches children about nanotechnology.
- Brain Pop – This site is available for both educators and students through a paid subscription. It’s especially helpful for teachers, as it offers videos and teaching ideas on nearly every subject.
- The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) allows teachers to use the web to research education ideas. There are thousands of examples of lesson plans, activities, media and more.
- This site is built for North Carolina teachers, but it is useful for anyone anywhere. It provides teaching ideas and resources for all grade levels. It lets the user search for educational websites in a variety of subjects via the “Best of the Web” section.
Useful Books
The following books offer additional information and insights and are well worth the investment to include them in a classroom or school library collection. They offer teachers and students wonderful resources from which to gain more depth on coursework. Each of these is also at least partly available for free online at the links listed below.
“Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives” (2005, Rowman & Littlefield) is a nifty round-up of communications history, new issues introduced in the Internet age and predictions about what may lie ahead. It looks at the future and past of pervasive networks of all kinds incorporating the stories of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the Luddites, Socrates’ opposition to the “technology” of writing, the Romantics, the Utopians, technorealists, and a projected battle between Cosmists and Terrans over a future in which artilects may dominate the galaxy. It shares concepts of such thinkers as Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Orwell, Marshall McLuhan, Vannevar Bush, Duncan Watts, Fritjof Capra, and Isaac Asimov while parsing the thoughts of Bill Gates, Nicholas Negroponte, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Sterling, Clifford Stoll, Al Gore, and dozens of other networked communications stakeholders and skeptics. For information and an excerpt go to the Publications page.
“City of Bits”(1994) by William J. Mitchell. Written by the dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The traditional printing of this book was followed in the spring and summer of 1995 with a companion online issue – what was labeled as “the first full-text interactive book on the World Wide Web.” It is one of the finest looks at what may be that was generated in this era. It is available for free online at The MIT Press website.
“Being Digital”(1995) by Nicholas Negroponte. One of the high-visibility ambassadors of the Internet in the 1990s, Negroponte wrote and spoke in glowing terms of “being digital,” seeing a glowing future for the world. The co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab offered here an introduction to the possibilities of digital communication for the uninitiated. He had helped bankroll the start-up of Wired magazine in 1993, and his monthly column for that publication – considered the Rolling Stone of the technology age – forms the basis for this book, considered to be a classic predictive book about the potential of networking. Portions of the book are available for free at the Being Digital archive site. You can also freely access many writings by Negroponte on the Wired magazine archive site.
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