FARNET Stories Project

51 Reasons to Invest in the National Information Infrastructure

story045.NJ

Submitted by:

Jay Pfaffman
Computer Coordinator
Math & Computer Science
Dwight-Englewood School
315 E. Palisade Ave.
Englewood, NJ 07631 USA

v: (201) 569-9500
f: (201) 569-1688
e: pfaffman@des.edu

Categories:

Education, K12

Keywords:

More equitable access to technology or electronic information Creation of new ideas, products, or services

The Story:

Because I was given free access to an account on the Internet (on pilot.njin.net through Rutgers), I was able to do the following:

Find a program, cc4, (Now called x(plore)) that our math department now uses regularly. We also use a bunch of other programs that were downloaded from SIMTEL-20 or its mirrors. Now we get a quarterly CDROM which is a copy of SIMTEL-20 so that we don't have to ftp & download anymore. Without access to newsgroups I would not have learned of this valuable resource.

Satellite images will be used in earth science classes in a couple weeks. He may use those images & maps for kids to predict the weather instead of a traditional test. The process of dialing up, perusing the services list, ftping to several sites, & wading through directories at cryptic file names was still a bit much for this teacher. I'll download the images & give them to the teacher to use in class. If we had a realtime connection, I think that I could start to teach people how to use it.

Other software we've gotten includes Waffle, a bbs that we use for e- mail. We get a free uucp e-mail feed through Rutgers as well. I would not have been able to learn to administer e-mail & news without first having access to it. Now all teachers & students at school have access to Internet e-mail. All through software that is cheap or free and inexpensive hardware. We also located a news-feed that is a local call away; again, I'd never have found him without access to the maps.

We haven't yet participated in any e-mail exchanges that directly support our curricula, but kids have enjoyed exchanging letters with pen-pals in the USA and Europe.

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