E-Mail facilitates:

• communications between students and colleagues around the world
• exchange of ideas and expertise
• getting answers to questions and taking distance or online courses

Internet regulating committees have set certain conventions for naming domains such as. .com, .edu, .org, .ca, which signify commercial, non-profit organizations, US universities, and Canada domains respectively.

 Electronic Mailing Lists or Listservs ( Electronic Subscription Service)

One of the most interesting things about the internet is that there  is such a large group of people using it. Even the most obscure topic can be actively discussed and debated world wide. An electronic mail list is usually a collection of people who have subscribed to the list to discuss a mutually interesting topic. There are thousands of lists available. Electronic mail is one example of the one-to-many broadcasting capabilities of the net. You subscribe to the list by sending email to a special program called a listserver and ask to join the list.

Messages from members are delivered to the list address and received by all of the members in their mail inbox. Some lists have a high volume of messages ( perhaps 20+ ) every day. Others may only have a few messages a month. Many high volume mailing lists have digests which  bundle all of the daily  messages into one message per day with a table of contents listing all of the subject headers of the messages. Some Lists also have archives . In many cases this is preferable to joining a group since you are not inundated with a lot of mail.

Some lists are moderated by an administrator, some are private, and some are totally public and unmoderated. In the latter, one needs to be very discriminating as to the veracity or accuracy of the information given since no expert is checking on the accuracy.

In order to participate in one of these discussion groups, you need to:

1. Find the appropriate list (This is not an easy task since new mailing lists are created and die out daily)
 

• To find a good list to join go to some of the following: If the list has an archive, read some of the messages to see if the discussions seem worthwhile before deciding to join a group.
• Consult the findings of previous Ed467 students at http://www.stfx.ca/people/rjmackin/ed467/listservs.htm
• Jerry Taylor's Good Listservs ( I concur with his choices) at http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/suny/listservs.htm
• Ask Eric http://www.accesseric.org/resources/listservs.html
•  Join an Educational Mailing List at: http://www.siec.k12.in.us/~west/edu/list.htm -there are a number of very good lists on this page such as Hilites, Classroom Connect, K-12 opps,
• Edweb's Educational Mailing Lists and How to Subscribe -  How to subscribe to a list and a listing of many educational lists
• One List ( Be careful here since a lot of the lists have very low membership and this may result in disappointing results) allows one to join and cancel many lists in one stop shopping at: Onelist k-12 education
• See your Textbook CD-ROM --> click on Computers - Email or see your textbook, Chapter 7
• Go to some of the major educational sites and see their favorite lists
• Calder's This day in History - sends you sites based on historical events of the day each day of the year at http://www.calder.net/history/h.htm
  
  Archived Lists
  
  
• Big Tip: No Time to read all of that Mail? Then go to this very handy archive page to search the archives of many educational listservs - Ask Eric Education List Archive at http://ericir.syr.edu/plweb-cgi/fastweb?searchform+listservs
• *Education Mailing List Archive at http://ericir.syr.edu/Virtual/Listserv_Archives/index.html#Browse

       Great place to get archived messages and subscription information

2. Subscribing to a list

4. Once you have been fully admitted to the list, you should wait and read the messages for a while to find out the tone of the list. This is called lurking. You may then want to post a message yourself by sending an e-mail to the Submission Mail Address ( List Address) - in this case it is t2t@teachnet.com
5. When you decide to quit the list , you must unsubscribe

To unsubscribe to t2t:

Newsgroups ( Electronic Bulletin Boards)
Usenet is an international network of computer networks following defined technical protocols for transmitting messages (often called "articles" on the Usenet network) among discussion fora, known as "newsgroups."

Newsgroups are also discussion groups or fora, but instead of the messages being sent to your mailbox, they are posted centrally and they can then be accessed with a news reader program.
There are over 20,000 different interest groups from arts to recipes. They are an exciting resource, but unless filtered are not ideal for classroom use. Because they are not moderated in most cases, unsavory subjects can come up unexpectedly.

In order to read usenet or newsgroups, you must make sure that you edit your preferences . The following screen shows you how it should be set up.

For instructions as to how to get newsgroups on campus see the TSG documentation at http://www.stfx.ca/TSG/Documents/Subscribe_&_Use_NewsGroups.html

I have prepared a short instructional page also at  http://www.stfx.ca/people/rjmackin/info130/HowToGetNewsgroups.htm

Some Forums or groups of interest to teachers might be:
 
 
 
 
 

Newsgroups available under k12.ed

• k12.ed.art Arts & crafts curricula in K-12 education.
• k12.ed.business Business education curricula in grades K-12.
• k12.ed.comp.literacy Teaching computer literacy in grades K-12.
• k12.ed.health-pe Health and Physical Education curricula in grades K-12.
• k12.ed.life-skills Home Economics, career education, and school counseling.
• k12.ed.math Mathematics curriculum in K-12 education.
• k12.ed.music Music and Performing Arts curriculum in K-12 education.
• k12.ed.science Science curriculum in K-12 education.
• k12.ed.soc-studies Social Studies and History curriculum in K-12 education.
• k12.ed.special Educating students with handicaps and/or special needs.
• k12.ed.tag K-12 education for gifted and talented students.

k12.ed.tech Industrial arts & vocational education in grades K-12.

K12.chat.elementary (General bulletin board for youngsters, including keypal listings)
K12.chat.teacher
K12.lang.francais
alt.education.disabled
Alt.teachers.lesson-p

A very extensive list of Educational Newsgroups is found at http://learninfreedom.org/ed-newsgroups.html
       (scroll down to ca... to see Canada' schoolnet newsgroups.However these have very few messages.)
Differences between Mailing List and Newsgroups:

• The subject matter (thread) in a Newsgroup is sorted according to subject and one can only read the messages one is interested in, whereas one receives all messages in a Mailing List.
• Because the postings are not moderated in a Newsgroup in most cases, one needs to be able to discern the authenticity of messages. In a Mailing List, there is usually a moderator to help with this as well as the members of the List usually correct one another much as in a live discussion group. This of course is something high school students ,especially, need to be able to do. Having students access newsgroups in school is not a good idea because unsavory messages may be posted to these educational newsgroups.

1. Choose power Search and fill in the form by typing in your keywords such as teaching  +anatomy
2. for language choose English
3. for Forum Choose K12.ed.science
4. for Sort By choose Subject
5. Browse the list of articles and click on one that interests you
6. You may go back or forward to messages or you can post a response (be very careful what you say because that will be there forever for all the world to see)

One can also try searching the topic on Search Engines such as Infoseek Ultra, Excite, and Lycos and click the Newsgroup or Usenet option.

St. Francis Xavier University
Home Page http://www.stfx.ca/people/rjmackin/welcome.html

X Home     Ed 467 Home