For this informal presentation (3-5 minutes), your assignment is to spend some time (a few minutes? a few hours? It’s up to you) looking around at the potential that technology presents to you as a future teacher. There are a number of ways to approach this task. You can pick and choose as you like:

• Discipline: Find sites that are devoted to your specific field/concentration area. History, art, English, science, math, physical education, liberal studies--there are pages for all these disciplines. Look at some.
• Project/Topic: Try to find some technology-based resources for a particular topic or project that you might teach--be it the Crimean war or omnivorous dinosaurs.
• Lesson plans: Find some sites that have lesson plans in your area. Take a look at them and evaluate their usefulness/effectiveness.
• Content: Look for sites that have content that might enhance something you want to teach--in other words, find some places to which you might point your students.

As you look through these sites, keep some questions in mind.

• How useful is this information?
• Could it be found more easily elsewhere?
• Is the information accurate and reliable? How do you know?
• Of the time spent websurfing, what percent (best guess) was wasted in sorting through garbage? How does that affect your perception of the potential for technology to restructure education?
• Do the benefits of this information access outweigh the bother of wading through bad web pages?

Keep track of your findings in a chart (or some other way of organizing your efforts). Be prepared to provide the web address for any particularly helpful sites.

Try different search engines like Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, Hotbot, AltaVista, and Ask to start off. Ask is a particularly interesting new development worth examining--it allows the user to ask a question in simple language, and (perhaps) find an answer to that question. Try asking, for instance, if Tinky Winky is gay, or when the 8-track tape player was invented, or where you can find lesson plans, and see what Ask can come up with in response. It seems to be similar to what Alan Kay is suggesting in his essay ... What do you think of it?