Librarians seldom give enough thought to the needs of potential Web-site visitors. Few librarians, for example, stop to consider how they can make their sites easy to use or more attractive. As a result, many sites have awful color schemes, hard-to-find navigation buttons, inappropriate font sizes, and confusing layouts. No wonder they don't…

If you build it, will they come? This is one of the fundamental questions anybody creating a Web site has to confront, whether you're a business person, a Web professional or a home user. One of the fundamental ways to ensure people do come, and return, is to make the content of your site as appealing and as accessible as possible. A new study by…

Traditionally, portfolios have been used as a visual arts tool showcasing an artist's accomplishments and personally favored works. Today, maintaining a portfolio in the classroom has been found to have many uses both to the teacher and the student. And the contents are just as diverse as the students who create them. A folder--paper or…

Finding Internet sites useful in the K-3 classroom and library can be a challenge. Between needing activities that will allow the users to be independent, searching for sites without a great deal of advertisements, and checking to be sure that any information gathered is kept private and respects the user's safety, it may b difficult to provide…

Laura Ingersoll Secord was, admittedly, a well-known historical figure--at least in Canada over a century before the development of the World Wide Web. In 1860, she first achieved widespread notoriety in her adopted homeland of Canada (she was born in Massachusetts) when a deed she performed for the British army during the War of 1812 was publicly…

This article describes an alternative way of teaching about biomes by having students become expert biogeographers. In order to become experts students need to first find out what a biogeographer does. Doing an online search lets students find out for themselves what the responsibilities are of people who work in this field. A good place to visit…

In this article, the author presents twelve considerations to think about if a school district is planning to redesign or reorganize its website. These are: (1) Your website is your calling card; (2) Don't play hide and seek; (3) Is your mission to promote the mission?; (4) Skip the apple; (5) Keep it simple; (6) Be up to date; (7) Keep your fonts…

Isakson presents several Web sites to increase students' awareness of career possibilities and the education choices required to reach them. Among other things, Occupational Information Network (O*NET) Online, which can be viewed at http://online.onetcenter.org/, offers a straightforward interface that lets the user search the database by using…

In this article, the author presents several Web sites supporting electronic presentation skills. The sites featured here will help fine-tune one's skills in modeling effective presentations and provide suggestions for managing student presentations meeting National Educational Technology Standards (NETS). Most use PowerPoint, the current industry…

This study examined the user-interface design characteristics of 107 Fortune 500 B2C e-commerce Web sites and industry differences. Data were collected from corporate homepages, B2C product/service pages, B2C interactive shopping pages, as well as customer satisfaction of 321 online shoppers. The findings indicate that (a) to attract online…

Katherine Keil, a high school English teacher, has developed an approach that goes beyond simply teaching poetry to creating classrooms that celebrate poetry in order to overcome the fear of poetry in students and the teacher. She encourages students to play with language, publishes student's work to a web site and models the writing process…

"Where does the Sun go at night?" or "Why don't the Australians fall off?" are typical of the innocent questions that children ask. A new "Earth and Beyond" primary science learning programme from the University of Bradford is piloting some exciting ways to engage children with these questions and providing…

Purpose: To examine and discuss the features of library portals and suggest further development of these research tools. Design/methodology/approach: The two categories of library portals (horizontal or public, and vertical) were examined to establish the characteristics of some of the portal software available in the marketplace. The study…

In this article, the author reviews James Farmer's "IncSub," short for "incorporated subversion," a Web site that combines many of the new approaches to educational technology. It is at heart a weblog, written by an Australian educational technologist; but in addition to the almost daily comments threading the tapestry of the new model of online…

The present study has three purposes: (a) to determine who disseminates information on cochlear implants on the Web; (b) to describe a representative sample of Web sites that disseminate information on cochlear implants, with a focus on the content topics and their relevance to parents of deaf children; and (c) to discuss the practical issues of…