Hooked On The Net The Internet Is Changing The Ways In Which People Work, Communities Are Formed And Students Learn

Doug Voda found love on the Internet. She is a curvaceous 20-year-old who dresses in silver and hangs out at the racetrack. Voda, of Spokane, met her while cruising the Internet one Friday night. She captured his heart and they’ve been inseparable ever since.

Another example of the seedy side of the Internet? Not at all. Voda’s new love is a silver HotWheels 1972 Boss Hoss Mustang Sizzler, sold to him for a cool $12.

A collector of HotWheels, Voda discovered several home pages on the World Wide Web advertising collections from around the country.

Within days he had located and purchased the last remaining cars in his Mustang series.

“Most of the benefits of the Internet have been the contacts I’ve made with fellow collectors,” says Voda, “which is invaluable for finding potential trades for the cars I’m still missing.”

Hobbyists, students and professionals are discovering that when it comes to information, the Internet is a powerful tool.

Information that was previously found through books, conventions and contacts, can now be instantaneously retrieved with the click of a mouse.

And along with information, the Internet brings together individuals, which is changing the ways in which people work, communities are formed and students learn.

Just ask a group of kindergarten students.

“The progress was amazing when we were researching dinosaurs using the Internet,” says Sandy Mansfield, kindergarten teacher at First Presbyterian school in Spokane.

Mansfield says she owes her Internet success story to Don Lamson, the father of one of her students. An Internet enthusiast, Lamson volunteered to surf the Net for paleontology information.

“I posted a message on the Internet,” says Lamson, “that my daughter belongs to a kindergarten class presenting a dinosaur museum and if anyone had information on the giganotosaurus, I would appreciate it.”

By the next morning, Lamson had received 30 e-mail messages from around the world, many from expert paleontologists. Some wrote to him while on site at a dinosaur dig in northern Argentina.

“They gave me information on where giganotosaurus was found, the correct pronunciation of the name and speculations on the size. And I passed everything on to Sandy’s class.”

“The answers we were getting from the Internet were building on the lessons that day,” says Mansfield, “and the next day we would have more questions. The children had information that had not even been published in a book yet.”

Mansfield is hooked. “The idea of having children be on the leading edge of technology, finding out the answers to their questions. One of our children someday could end up with a shovel in that same dig. This is true learning in the ‘90s.”

Students in all levels of school need to be able to navigate and find information on the Internet, says Tom Casto, a Spanish teacher at Shadle Park High School.

“I believe they’ll need these skills in the future,” he says.

Casto has found several ways to teach his students Internet skills while teaching them Spanish. His students have created newsletters in Spanish and English using clips, articles and pictures they have found on the Internet.

Casto’s most impressive project is the creation of a site on the World Wide Web called Famous Washington. Students were asked to write about a famous person or place in the state of Washington, translate their essay into Spanish, and add pictures.

A group of his students took the essays and translated them into hypertext markup language, read by the World Wide Web. The completed Web site is available for all to view (http://www.shadle.org/espanol).

“Students from South America and Mexico can access our ‘Famous Washington’ Web site, says Casto, “and learn about our state in their own language.”

Don Story is another Shadle Park teacher embracing the Internet in his profession.

As a technology instructor, Story is directing an ongoing project with his students to create a Shadle Park High School Web site giving information about Shadle Park sports, faculty and alumni (http://www.shadle.org).

“We get sidetracked on the technology itself,” says Story. “The most effective use of technology is to enhance and change the way kids learn. And to help them shift from being consumers of information to producers.”

Toward this endeavor, the students in Story’s class are producing a Web site for Seattle’s Woodland Park zoo.

“A teacher in Seattle gave me this contact,” says Story. “The Web site the zoo currently has is not very interactive. They were looking for a more interactive experience for younger kids, a virtual walking tour of the zoo with animal sounds.”

His students are incorporating movies, sound and graphics into the Web site to create an on-line zoo tour, using children from local elementary schools to test it.

And how do students react to using the Internet?

“I think it’s very engaging to them,” says Steve Willett, a sixth-grade teacher from Garfield Elementary, who uses the Internet to communicate with his students.

“They can write me a question when they get home,” says Willett, “and I answer it from home and it comes directly to them. One of my students said, ‘I like asking you questions this way because I never get interrupted.’ “

When one of Willett’s students moved to Japan last fall, Willett developed an e-mail exchange between his class in Spokane and his student’s new class in Kyoto.

“We got to feel part of her experience over there through the Internet,” says Willett. “This is much different from standing up and telling the students what is going on in Japan. It becomes much more personal and much more powerful. Traditional curriculum doesn’t lend itself to this.”

If the Internet has the potential to revolutionize the learning process, it also makes possible a new form of community, clustered by common experience rather than geography.

“My family does more than use the Internet. I think we live it,” says Mari Nichols of Spokane, mother of four children who designs Web pages for a living.

Nichols has used the Internet to look for housing, book air travel, attend on-line classes, even fix her car.

“The most remarkable thing to me,” says Nichols, “is that the cyber friends I’ve met are as real as my real life friends. My husband had a brain hemorrhage when I was five months pregnant and these people were there to listen to my heartache and support me. When he died, they started a memorial fund in his name. “The Internet is more than resources out ‘there,’ it’s real people living in as much of a community as any city.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: Jeff and Lynn Gibson are Spokane parents and users of the Internet. You can write to them at cybrfamily@aol.com.

This sidebar appeared with the story: REV UP THOSE SEARCH ENGINES Here are a few easy steps to get on your way to finding fun and useful information on the web: 1. Go to the World Wide Web. 2. Type in one of these Web addresses, http://www.yahoo.com or http://www.altavista.digital.com. Hit Return. Yahoo and Altavista are two popular search engines which will scan the Web for your topic. 3. In the search box, type in a key word, such as “dinosaur” and hit “Search.” 4. If the search is successful, a list of web sites will appear on the screen. Scroll to an interesting entry, click on it and begin surfing.