Delmar Travels to Baltimore
"It is not simply good enough to have the technology; we must learn to use the
technology."
Maryland Governor Parris Glendening
Maryland Technology College Showcase
University of Baltimore
December 12 and 13, 1995
"It is not simply good enough to have the technology; we must learn to use the
technology."
Maryland Governor Parris Glendening
Maryland Technology College Showcase
University of Baltimore
December 12 and 13, 1995
...and we were there!
No, the students did not travel across the Bay only to *see* emerging technologies in the State of Maryland. They were too busy giving demonstrations of what Wicomico County students have been doing on the Internet for the past five years.
Several weeks ago I received a call from Greg Talley at the Maryland State Department of Education asking if I would travel to Baltimore for the Maryland Technology College Showcase. Arrangements were made and four Delmar students, a parent and I drove happily across the Chesapeake Bay on December 12 eager to share our exciting adventures using our World Wide Web pages. We knew that we could demonstrate Governor Glendening's desire that Maryland be a leader in emerging technologies by accessing our own "Global Classroom" on the Web. Our electronic portfolio speaks for itself.
The four girls, Amanda, Ashley, Tessa and Casie found it difficult to narrow their topics to discuss. Each student is involved in many global activities and they bubbled their enthusiasm to all who would listen on Tuesday.
Despite technical difficulties (no Internet connection for most of the first
presentation!) the students 'took charge' of the sessions and I walked quietly
to the back of the room and watched them with admiration.
Visiting university professors were simply amazed to see the girls explaining their own homepages they had created - and without any HTML editor. They had just been to sessions where some adults backed away from html writing saying that it looked too complicated!
Barbara Reeves from MSDE was fascinated by what the girls were showing her on the large screen displaying their handiwork. "How did you get that picture on the screen?" she asked completely baffled. Ashley quickly pulled down the source code and showed her that the image was a file that was placed in a tag in the .html file.
At one point the students saw a background on a page which they liked and before anyone knew it (and certainly no one understood!) they checked the source code for the background .jpg file and scrambled for paper to write down the filename. I smiled inwardly as my 11 year old 'spiders' crawled around the Web and delighted their adult visitors.
The students have written their feelings about telecommunications in general and below are thoughts about this trip in particular:
"I really liked the trip. Most of all, I liked "showing off" my home page. It was a little weird, teaching adults, especially since I did not know them." - Tessa
"I went to Baltimore on the 12th of December to show people how we use the Internet. I was a little nervous to do this in front of people but it turned out to be fun. I was so excited. I talked to people about the things that we use the internet for and how it can help us in our life. It was so so so so fun." - Casie
Images were processed courtesy of David Blosveren and CPI Photo Finish at the Centre At Salisbury.
pweeg@shore.intercom.net
