The Internet as we know it today is a global network connecting millions computers. As of 1998, the Internet has more than 300 million users worldwide, and that number is growing rapidly. More than 100 countries are linked into exchanges of data, news, opinions, and now sounds, movies, and products. It wasn’t always quite so simple and quite so vast.

The Internet was first conceived in the early '60s as a Cold War concept for controlling the tattered remains of a post-nuclear society. Under the leadership of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), it grows from an idea on paper in the early to mid 60’s into a small network called ARPANET. While the original idea was birthed as a way to control you and I after a nuclear holocaust (if we survived), as it grew from an idea to a reality, its main intended use was to promote the sharing of super-computers amongst researchers in the United States.

1969 - Researchers at four US campuses created the first hosts of the ARPANET, connecting Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah and thus the Internet was born, although it would not be called the internet for a number of years.

1970 – 1973 - The ARPANET becomes an immediate success from the very beginning. Although originally designed to allow scientists to share data and access remote computers, email quickly became the most popular application. The ARPANET became a high-speed (by 1970’s standards) digital post office as people began using it to collaborate on research projects and discuss topics of various interests. Interestingly enough, that is still one of the most valuable ways that you as a teacher can use the Internet in your classroom… collaborative projects and discussion groups.

So, it all began in 1969 as a governmental (and really, military) project.

1973 - The ARPANET goes international with connections to University College in London, England and the Royal Radar Establishment in Norway.

1974 - 1981

The general public gets its first vague hint of how networked computers can be used in daily life as the commercial version of the ARPANET goes online. The ARPANET starts to move away from its military/research roots.

1974 - Bolt, Beranek & Newman opens Telenet, the first commercial version of the ARPANET. 

1982 - 1987 - Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf and team create TCP/IP, the common language of all Internet computers. For the first time the loose collection of networks which made up the ARPANET is seen as an "internet", and the Internet as we know it today is born.

The mid-80s marks a boom in the personal computer and super-minicomputer industries. The combination of inexpensive desktop machines and powerful, network-ready servers allows many companies to join the Internet for the first time. Corporations begin to use the Internet to communicate with each other and with their customers.

1982 - The term "Internet" is used for the first time.

The proliferation of networks continues and increases

1986 - NSFNET backbone is created with a speed of 56Kbps. It was originally created to support the National Science Foundation’s Supercomputer Centers across the country. As it evolved, its mission expanded to include support of research and education for the newly Internet-enabled academic and research community as more and more educational institutions joined the bandwidth wagon.

NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC, Theory Center@Cornell). This allows an explosion of connections, especially from universities.

1990 - A happy victim of its own unplanned, unexpected success, the ARPANET is decommissioned, leaving only the vast network-of-networks called the Internet.

1991 - 1993 - Corporations wishing to use the Internet face a serious problem: commercial network traffic is banned from the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, the backbone of the Internet. In 1991 the NSF lifts the restriction on commercial use, clearing the way for the age of electronic commerce.

This is what the NFSNET looked like in 1993

As technology improved and demand increased the National Science Foundation, the operator and presumably the owner of the main (or maybe one and only real) backbone in the US, upgraded their technology and the information highway began to become an information superhighway.

If we could overlay each of those pictures on top of one another, you could really begin to get a picture of what the Internet in America looks like. And I have only shown you four backbone segments. There are more. AT&T, Sprint, and MCI all have backbones that are part of the Internet. And you need to understand that these are not proprietary networks that only certain people can access. If you have an Internet connection (through SWBELL or Interconnect or ESC 2) you have a connection to any host computer on any one of the backbones bother here and around the world. These three pictures demonstrate that the Internet is truly a network of networks.

When the Internet celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1996, the military strategies that influenced its birth had become historical footnotes. Approximately 40 million people were connected to the Internet. More than $1 billion per year changed hands at Internet shopping malls, and Internet related companies like Netscape have become the darlings of high-tech investors.

Users in more than 150 countries around the world are now connected to the Internet.

The number of computer hosts has surpassed 10 million (now exceeds 300 million).

Within 30 years, the Internet has grown from a Cold War concept for controlling the tattered remains of a post-nuclear society to the Information Superhighway. Just as the railroads of the 19th century enabled the Machine Age, and revolutionized the society of the time, the Internet has thrust us into the Information Age, and profoundly affected the world in which we live. The Age of the Internet has arrived.

Email is still one of the most popular uses of the Internet. Data is exchanged at an astronomical rate. Businesses, schools, organizations, governments, and individuals have web sites that do everything from entertain to inform. The world has truly become a giant library that anyone with an Internet connection can "check out." As technology advances, uses of the Internet expand. Now we are seeing real time voice and video communications (the stuff of science fiction movies only a few years ago). And the latest "craze" is the whole area of e-commerce. Billions of dollars are changing hands in business transactions and purchases via the Internet. Telecommuting is rapidly expanding use of the Internet. People work at home using the Internet as their connection to "the office", allowing them to choose where to live based on quality of life, not proximity to work. Many cities view the Internet as a solution to their clogged highways and fouled air. Schools use the Internet as a vast electronic library, with untold possibilities. Doctors use the Internet to consult with colleagues half a world away, and now we are seeing telemedicince centers springing up in many rural areas that can’t afford or support a state of the art hospital. And even as the Internet offers a single Global Village, it threatens to create a 2nd class citizenship among those without access. As a new generation grows up as accustomed to communicating through a keyboard as in person, life on the Internet will become an increasingly important part of life on Earth.

The Internet is here to stay (at least until December 31, 1999). The question is, how will influence and effect the way we educate children? Should it influence the way we educate children? How can we use it to improve what we do in schools on a day to day basis? Should we use it and if so why? Those are questions that every community of educators are going to have to face and answer in the very near future.

As a learning tool the Internet offers a universe of possibilities. There is literally an unbounded, unending, limitless, unimaginable, almost infinite amount of information on the Internet that you and your students can access and use in your daily class routine. The Internet’s second mission or purpose for existence was for research and sharing information. It is still the best source in the history of the world for doing that. You can find information on any subject that you can think of from any location in the world in a matter of a few seconds.

There are thousands of already created individual, small group, class, and whole school projects that you can participate in using resources on the Internet. Many if not most of the kinds of projects that you can involve your students in would be impossible without the Internet. How many of you could take your students on an expedition to Alaska or Mount Everest? There were two projects just recently that would have allowed them to travel along on just such an expedition via the Internet and experience first hand, what those who were physically there experienced. How many Junior High students would ever have the chance to see live pictures of the surface of another planet? With the Internet they can. And there are hundreds of thousands of other projects that you can do and participate in. We’ll talk about a few of them later.

Collaboration and collaborative learning has been a buzzword in education for a number of years. With the Internet in your classroom, collaboration can take on a new meaning and a new dimension and a new breadth that just wasn’t possible only a few years ago.

When I was in school, we often did some kind of "current events" projects. With the Internet current events and current issues can really be current. What is happening in the area of AIDS research? What is going on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? What is the most current information about El Nino? Current events can really be current, not just what you can find in a magazine article that was published three weeks ago after 6 months of research and 10 new breakthroughs have occurred since it went to press.

And of course, on significant impact that the Internet can and will and is having on education is that it give students a never before available platform to publish their ideas and offer them to the world for scrutiny and comment. The data is beginning to come in that shows that when students are going to put their ideas and their writing on the Internet, they take more care and do a more thorough job of researching the facts, they give more thought to forming an opinion or a conclusion, and they put more effort into learning how to communicate with the written word (grammar, spelling, style, etc). They become better thinkers and better writers.

Now, before any of that can happen, before you can begin to harvest any of the resources that they Internet has to offer, before this vast information and learning source can have one positive effect on one single student in your classroom, you have to learn how to use the Internet, and that is what the next part of the workshop is about…

In this part of the workshop we are going to explore a program called a browser and learn to move around on the web using the browser. The browser that you are going to be using is called…

Let’s start with a question. What is Internet Explorer? (It is an internet browser)

Here is another one. What is a browser? A browser is a program that you install on your computer that allows you to "browse" through or look around at things on the Web. With a browser you can find a particular site on the Web that you want to "visit," "load" that site onto your local computer, and then it interprets the code (the language) contained on that site into a form that you and I can understand and interact with. It is your Web Site Interpreter. The Web speaks or uses a language that not everybody can read and understand. Your browser interprets that language into pictures, colors, sounds, motion, and words that you and I can read and understand.

In addition to that, with a browser not only can you locate and read information, it is possible (and quite easy) to copy both text, graphics, and sounds off the Internet and use them in a word processing document or a PowerPoint presentation or in any other way that you want.

Basically, then, with a browser you can easily access any Web site anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. All that information that is out there is literally, at your fingertips when you have a computer, an Internet connection, and a browser, and the skills that you are going to learn today.

So now it is time. Let’s start Internet Explorer and explore the interface.

Title Bar

Menu Bar

Tool Bars

Scroll Bars

Status Bar

Address Box

We know that the information and the resources are out there. The first step in using it to impact student learning is to find it. How do we do that?

Every single computer on the Internet has a unique address. The computers that you are using today each have an address that no other computer in the entire world has. That is why you can find information on the Internet and how that information can travel from anywhere around the world to your computer. That unique address is called a URL (Universal Resource Locator)

The letters, numbers, and symbols used to make up the address of Web site tell your browser where to go to find that that particular site. On the slide the address reads http://www.tifb.state.tx.us/. That is the URL (the address) for the TIF board. Now find the address box on your computer and tell me what you see. (www.esc2.net) That is the address, the URL for our ESC Web Site, or at least it should be.

Every Web address consists of several parts. Some of them are necessary and some of them can be omitted.

The first part of the address tells your computer and the computer that you are connecting to what type of connection you are looking for. HTTP stands for hyper text transfer protocol. Most of the connections that you make will be of this type. In most cases, you don’t have to type the http://. I will tell you the exception to that in a minute. An HTTP connection allows you to see an html document on your computer.

About the only other common type of connection left is the ftp:// connection. That stands for file transfer protocol and you will use it to open an ftp site that you can download files from.

The next part of the address is the part that begins with www. That is name of the computer that you want to retrieve a web page from. This part of the address must always be present with no exceptions (except that now, sometimes, if you leave out the www part, you will still be able to go to that site). Most of the time you can omit the http. There are some addresses that don’t have the www in them and they will begin with http. In that case you have to type the http://. Notice on the slide that there are some numbers below the address. That is the actual address of that computer. Part of the network operating system that allows you to communicate on the Internet takes the name that you type in and "resolves it" to the number that is the address of the computer.

Often times you will see a "/" after the name of the computer, followed by some more information and another front slash. The information between the front slashes is the path to a folder (or more properly, a sub-directory) on the computer that you are connecting to. And finally you will often see some more information after the last front slash with a .htm or a .html at the end. The .htm(l) is the name of the file that you are looking at. (Look at some on our Web Site).

So you have a file -- in a folder (sub-directory) -- on a computer -- with a connection to the web. And when you put all those elements together, you have a web address that you can see on your computer. If you know the address, all you have to do is type it in address box, hit the enter key and you will and the folder and file that you want to see… theoretically.

As with most other things in life, web addresses have rules. If you are going to be successful in "getting to" a given web site, you have to enter the address according to the rules… every time.

Rule #1. Web addresses never have spaces in them. If you put a space in a web address, you will not be magically and mysteriously transported across cyberspace and connected to the computer that you are trying to connect to. You will not pass go, you will not collect $200 (or any information from that web server that you were trying to connect to)

Rule #2. Some addresses are case sensitive. More and more, however, case sensitivity is becoming less and less of an issue. (Demonstrate with Disney and disney) In fact, you may be hard pressed to find one that is case sensitive. But you do need to know that some may be.

Rule #3. You must include at least a computer name. The rest of the stuff is optional (usually) but you must include the computer’s name.

Here are few examples. Notice the variations. Also notice the last three characters of the names after the dot. Those are called extensions and they will give you a clue as to what type of site you are looking at… and help you find a site that you are looking for.

• .com is a commercial site
• .edu is an institute of higher learning
• .org is an organization
• .gov is a government site
• .net is a general catch all

Those are the most common ones, there are others. This will help you when you are looking for a site but are not sure of the address. For example, say you wanted to go to the TAMUCC site but didn’t know the address. What might the address be? (tamucc.edu). What if you wanted to find the web site for KRISTV? (kristv.com) What about the Red Cross? (redcross.org)

So one way to get around on the Internet is to type in the address of a site and hit the enter key on your keyboard. But, there is a problem with that. There are over 350 million web sites out there and even if you could find the names of all of them, you wouldn’t be able to remember them and keeping track of the useful ones would be an impossibility. So, there is another way to navigate the net.

A link is a word or a picture on a Web page that you can click on that will automatically take you to another Web site or Web page. It is your Internet connection to another site that is related in some way to the page that you are on. You don’t have to know the address or anything about the other site; all you have to do is find a link and single click on it. You will be automatically transported across cyberspace to a new location somewhere else in the world (or somewhere else on that same machine).

They are usually a different color than the surrounding non-link text. Blue used to be the standard but now it can be any color.

Words that are links are usually underlined to make them stand out on the page.

Pictures can also serve as links, any picture that can be put into a Web page can be made into a link.

The way to tell if something is a link is to place your mouse pointer on top of it. If it changes shapes to a hand, it is a link.

Find a link on the page that you are currently on and click on it. Find another one, and another one. As you can see, that can be an unending task and you will probably never exhaust all the links that are available to you from any given page or site. That is one of the things that makes the Internet so valuable, but it is also one of the things that can make it so frustrating and overwhelming.

Do you see the Button on the top left-hand side of your screen that says Back? Click on it and tell me what happens. (Wait) Do it again. Keep clicking on that button until you get back to the ESC 2’s Homepage. (I just used a word that you may not be familiar with … Homepage. A given entity will have a Web site that consists of many pages. The Homepage is like the front door to the rest of their pages, it usually contains links to the rest of the pages, and it also will usually have some kind of map or description telling you what else is available to you at this site.) You will find very often that you use a link and when you get to the site that you were linking to, the page does not contain any useful information and there is a good chance that it will not contain a link back to the site that you were at previously. The Back feature allows you to move back through a series of sites that you have already visited to return to a place that is useful to you. You will find yourself using it often. It is a very nice feature.

What do you think the function of the next button is? It does just the opposite of the Back button. If you have used the back button, the forward button will move you forward one site at a time. Somewhat useful, but not as useful as the back button.

This is a customizable feature in Internet Explorer. After you have customized it, click on this button will reveal a list of Web sites that you have deemed valuable and useful and that you want to be able to return to quickly and easily. When you pull your mouse down to one of the sites that you have added to this list and click it one time, you will automatically be transported to that site on the Internet without having to enter an address or even remember an address. Very useful, but you need to give some thought to what you put in your favorites and how you are going to organize them. It can get to be a very large and burdensome list very quickly. (Add a favorite to the favorites list and just mention the ability to organize it.)

So far in our quest to discover how to use the Internet and get from one place to another, we have talked about entering the address of a site, we have talked about using links, and we have talked about customizing your "favorites" list. But still, if you are looking for some information on a particular subject and you don’t have any URL’s to begin with, those methods are not going to be very helpful. With all the information that is out there, you need to know a technique to use to look for specific information, and there is just such a technique. The next topic that we are going to cover is called "Searching the Internet".

One of the things that makes the Internet so attractive and so exciting as an educational tool also can be the very thing that makes it frustrating. There are literally billions of pieces of information out there on the Web and the amount of information that is available is increasing dramatically on a daily basis. Trying to find information that would be useful to you in your classroom can sometimes be like trying to find a gold colored needle in a cosmic haystack. Without a tools that will effectively narrow the available data down to the information that you are looking for, the Internet would basically be useless. There are, however, tools that will do just that and they are called "Search Engines".

A search engine is a program that allows you to search documents on the Web for keyword(s) that you specify. After the search engine has located all the Web pages that are registered with it (the search engine) it give you a list of "hits" or "returns" that contains a list of the documents where your keyword(s) were found. This is called "performing a search" or "searching the Web". Each one of the documents (or Web pages) that contain your keyword is listed as a clickable link so all you have to do is click on the link to see the page.

In order to perform a search, you do need to know the address of some search engines. I will give you a list a latter, but for now, (www.esc2.net – Educational Links – Internet Search Engines) This is a list of several engines that Mark has compiled for us and made them easily accessible. Place you mouse pointer inside one of the boxes and type in a word. Let’s search for the word "Christmas". Click on the Search button and tell me what happens.

Now visit some of the sites that are returned by clicking on the links.

You will often want to search for something you can’t find with just a single word like "Christmas". When that time comes there are some techniques that you will need to use if you are going to be able to find anything useful in less than 24 hours. You will need to know how to do a Boolean search. For example, what if you only wanted to find sites that talked about Christmas trees? How would you do that?

In the example above, the search engine would find all it’s sites that contained either the word Christmas or the word tree. (Search engines are usually smart enough to know that you are looking for that phrase and will list the ones with the phrase first, but that is not always true.) If you really wanted to find only sites that contain the phrase Christmas Tree, you would use the following search criteria…

When you include your phrase, the search engine should only return those sites that contain the words within the parenthesis in the order that you type them, in other words, as a phrase.

When you perform this search, the returns that you get should contain all the sites that contain both the word Christmas and the word tree. But the kicker is that the words don’t have to be together, they can be located anywhere on the Web page. I was helping my daughter do a search the other day for the latitude and longitude of CC. I used this technique because I didn’t want those words to be together. Many times the returns will list sites that these words are found together as a phrase, but not always. This is a very useful technique. (Try it)

Other times you will want to find sites with (for example) Christmas but you will want to eliminate the sites that mention Christmas trees because you are not interested in that subject. In those cases you will use this technique…

This search should locate all the sites that contain the word Christmas but that do not contain the word tree anywhere in the site.

Now what if you wanted to find Christmas Tree Farms in Texas? Any ideas?

You could try "Christmas Tree Farm" +Texas and see what happens or, you could use the Infoseek engine. Let me show you how that works.

Enter the phrase "Christmas Tree" in the Infoseek box on our Web site and click on search. You should have gotten somewhere around 21,000 hits. Notice at the top of the page that there is an option "Search Again" or to "Search only within these 21,420 pages". If you choose the first option you would try some different words or a different Boolean search to narrow down your returns. But, if you select the second option, you could type in the word Farm and Infoseek would look in all those 21,420 pages and find any site that contained the word farm. (do it)

Now we are down to 733 pages and getting closer. What do you think the next step should be? Select the second radio button again and type in the word Texas. (Demonstrate Edit – Find to find Christmas Tree Farm on one or two of the pages)