170
ea of a Free-Net system. Many colleges and universities, however, are willing to discuss providing accounts for secondary students at little or no cost. Several states, including California and Texas, have Internet- linked networks for teachers and students.
12.2 SOME SPECIFIC RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
In addition, there are a number of resources on the Internet aimed specifically at elementary and secondary students and teachers. You can use these to set up science experiments with classes in another country, learn how to use computers in the classroom or keep up with the latest advances in teaching everything from physics to physical education.
Among them:
AskERIC Run by the Educational Resource and Information Center, AskERIC provides a way for educators, librarians and others interested in K-12 education to get more information about virtually everything. The center maintains an e-mail address (askeric@ericir.syr.edu) for questions and promises answers within 48 hours. It also maintains a gopher site that contains digests of questions and answers, lesson plans in a variety of fields and other educationally related information. The gopher address is ericir.syr.edu.
Health-Ed: A mailing list for health educators. Send a request to health-ed-request@stjhmc.fidonet.org
K12Net: Begun on the Fidonet hobbyist network, K12Net is now also carried on many Usenet systems and provides a host of interesting and valuable services. These include international chat for students, foreign-language discussions (for example, there are French and German- only conference where American students can practice those languages with students from Quebec and German). There are also conferences aimed at teachers of specific subjects, from physical education to physics. The K12 network still has limited distribution, so ask your system administrator if your system carries it.
Kidsphere: Kidsphere is a mailing list for elementary and secondary teachers, who use it to arrange joint
