Road Trip! Back to School

By Van Landrum

'It's time for the kids to go back to school, and the World-Wide Web (WWW) is an excellent place for them to find reference material for their school reports. So this issue's Road Trip shows how to navigate the information highway for its namesake: information!'

Let's begin with IBM's World-Wide Reference Library at http://www.ibm.net/library. This page lists five areas you can enter: General Reference Material; Science and Technology; Family and Health Resources; United States Information; plus Education and Training.
 * General Reference contains a reference shelf where you can find dictionaries, world maps, area code and zip code information, and a thesaurus, to mention a few. The General Reference also contains flags of the world, the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, U.S. Library of Congress Home Page, and other online educational resources.
 * Science and Technology connects you to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, U.S. Patent Office, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Friends of the Environment, and the National Science Foundation.
 * Family and Health Resources connects you to The Virtual Hospital, Genealogy Home Page, Disability Information Gopher, AIDS Related Information Gopher, Medicine Related Information Gopher, WWW Virtual Library, and Family History Research.
 * United States Information contains census information plus home pages for the U.S. Constitution, White House, FedWorld Information Network, Department of the Treasury, United States House of Representatives, United States Senate, Library of Congress, and United States Supreme Court.
 * Education and Training includes the AskEric Virtual Library, National Parent Information Network, Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Math and Science, National Center on Adult Literacy, NASA Educational Resources, University of Oregon Department of Physics, NASA's K-12 Internet Initiative, and the Adult Dyslexia Organization.

The White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov - see Figure 1) is an interesting place to visit on the WWW. This web site has many pictures of the White House, the president, and the first lady as well as other elected officials. You can learn about the different branches of our government, read current events news items, plus send e-mail to the president and others in the government.



'''Figure 1. White House Home Page'''

By drilling down from the NASA pages, you can find video clips in the Space Video Archive (http://www.univ-rennes1.fr/ASTRO/anim-e.html). The video clips display solar eclipses, meteorology, science fiction, space, Shoemaker-Levy, Apollo missions, lunar probes, and more. The clips come in a variety of formats and are quite wonderful to view. In general, the NASA pages are rich in images and information for all ages.

While these pages provide a great start in finding research materials, try the IBM Internet Exploration Toolkit (http://www.ibm.net/explore) if the topic you're looking for is not here. Select WWW Search Tools, and you will find a variety of ways to search the WWW for specific information. I usually like to use the Web Crawler. Just enter a few key words and click on Search for a list of sites. The list that is returned is indexed with the best match listed first and indexed at 1000. The other sites will be listed in order of best match and indexed relative to the first item. You can set the number of results to return from 10 to 500 on the search page.

One of the more famous educational resources on the WWW is the interactive frog dissection at http://george.lbl.gov/ITG.hm.pg.docs/dissect/dissect.html. The Whole Frog Project is at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Research Division, Office of Scientific Computing, John Cavallini program manager.

This page displays an illustration of an intact frog (Figure 2). Checkboxes on the page let you include or exclude any of a number of organs in the illustration. Select Skin Off and then SEND, and you will see the frog's skeleton and internal organs.



'''Figure 2. Virtual Frog Dissection Kit'''

By selecting only the heart, lungs, and skeleton, and changing the view from top to bottom, you can isolate these or any other set of organs. (A movie is also available--the frog rotates for you to see it from all sides.) This page, using interaction, graphics, and multimedia, is an excellent example of the Internet's capabilities.

Show your kids how to find information on the World-Wide Web for their school reports. Available 24 hours a day, the information can be easily downloaded into their notes. Pictures and illustrations can be captured and dropped into word processing programs for final reports. You don't have to drive from one library to another--just jump into your WebExplorer and head down the information highway.