Teaching Kids How to Talk to the World

As we've said, the Internet isn't really about computers; it's about people communicating and collaborating with each other. Even though the Web seems to get all the media attention, email and other messaging applications may be the most powerful Internet use of all. They connect people directly, just like the telephone, with advantages the telephone lacks, such as the ability to communicate with many people at once at their convenience.

If you really want to help kids become successful in the digital age, however, focus less on the tools and more on the human communication skills they'll need to use those tools effectively. After all, email is about more than sending a message: It's about the message we're sending, who's receiving it, what it can do and what we want back.

We're using the term messaging here to mean any software program that let's you send a message directly to one person or to many people at once. Messaging differs from Web use because it involves your taking the initiative to communicate with a specific person or to react to a message sent to you. Web sites, in contrast, passively wait for someone else to take the initiative by visiting them. Moreover, Web site visitors are anonymous, for the most part, unless they choose to identify themselves by sending a message to the site owner. One of the most important aspects in building a good Web page is adding features that let people get in touch with you through email and other messaging applications.

About Email and Email Addresses

Email is by far the most important and popular messaging application. The number of email messages sent in a day, a week and a year far surpasses the number of letters sent through the post office. Its convenience and versatility have made it an essential tool for doing business today in every field.

You need an email account in order to send and receive email; that's usually a basic service offered by your center's Internet Service Provider (ISP). Most likely, your center will create separate email accounts for all of its staff. Once you start adding dozens or even hundreds of kids, however, separate accounts may be too much for your ISP contract or technical people to handle. Web-based and free email services are available, however, which you can use if your center does not offer email accounts to you or your kids; some of them are listed below in the additional resources section below. (Note that few things are truly free, and most "free" services may append ads to the bottom of your emails; however, they are fairly unobtrusive and are a small price to help you get your kids connected to the world.)

It's important to get email access for the children, so explore your options. You may have the flexibility to take a number of different approaches for different classes or children of different ages. Check with your network administrator for other ideas and to learn how email works at your facility.

An email account is identified by an email address. Standard email addresses have two parts, separated by an @ symbol. To the left of the @ is the user name, the part that identifies you personally. You may be able to pick this part yourself, such as when you choose a user name at America Online, or someone at your center may have a special system for assigning user names for everyone. The part of the address to the right of the @ identifies the domain where your account resides. If your center has purchased a domain for its Web site, such as youthlearn.org, this may be the domain name for your email address. If you get your service through another company, it will specify the domain. For example, everyone who uses America Online has "@aol.com" as the second part of his or her email address. For more on domains, see the section on the Web in YouthLearn's technology section.

Keep in mind that people can have many different email accounts. You might have a personal account with America Online or Hotmail, and another at your center. Your kids may have accounts at home, at school and at your center as well. The computers, of course, don't know that they all belong to you. If email is sent to bob@aol.com, it can only be received at that account, not at bsmith@yourcenter.com, even though the mail is for the same person.

Using Email in Class

All email programs are simple to use, and they won't take long to present to your kids. Follow the guidelines for teaching about technology when introducing the software. It is important that you train kids to think about communication, which means that you need to do two things:

1. Use email frequently to reinforce basic communication and language skills, such as reading and writing. Try activities in which you send emails to each other, to kids in other classes, and to other people in the center or community. Try finding email "pen pals" in other parts of the country or the world. In addition, you should familiarize the class with some conventions of communicating through email, called netiquette, although it's not important to get to this first thing.

2. More important, you should train kids in the conscious habit of communicating with people and email is the best tool for doing so because it lets people respond at their convenience. Teach kids to (politely) contact experts and sources through email in their research projects and to build communication features into their Web pages. Even just putting their email addresses on printed documents helps them internalize this habit. Part of the beauty of the Internet is how it opens new horizons for kids. The next step is getting them used to collaborating with the people they meet.

Don't forget to teach kids about safety on the Internet It's just a reflection of the larger world, and some predators look for kids through email and other messaging applications. Make sure they know how to avoid danger, just like not taking candy from strangers.

Online Communities

The next step in using email is to introduce facilities that involve groups of people. Because email messages are essentially free and can be mailed to any number of people at any time, email is a powerful tool for bringing people together. In fact, long before the Web existed, some of the greatest network activity was in USENET, a worldwide bulletin board system with more than 14,000 newsgroups that is still used daily by millions of people around the world.

The following are different tools for many-to-many communication:

• Electronic mailing lists, also known as listserves, listservs and email groups, allow many people to exchange information and/or have a discussion through email. Electronic mailing lists focus on a topic; the topic can be as big as "technology and society" or as specific as "lesson plans using KidPix for young children." To use a list, you "subscribe" by sending an email message to the specific list address. Once you subscribe, you will automatically receive all the messages other subscribers "post" or send to the list. Electronic mailing lists can be open and unfiltered with a few thousand people participating; they can also be closed and moderated with only a few specific people conversing. Most fall somewhere in the middle. They are easy to set up, but can be time-consuming to manage well. Note: Listserv is actually a trademarked name for a popular software product that is made by L-Soft Corporation that manages email groups. The more generic term is electronic mailing list.

• News list generally refers to one-way broadcasts, such as electronic newsletters, to people who are interested in a particular subject. Usually, no communication occurs among the subscribers, although people may sometimes communicate back to the editor, much like writing a letter to the editor of a magazine. For example, many Web sites allow you to subscribe to email updates from the organization that runs the site. You might create an email newsletter of your own to communicate with center personnel and supporters, just like a traditional newsletter. To create a news list, you can set up an electronic mailing list that is configured to only send posts from you and not to receive messages from other subscribers.

• Bulletin board, forum or threaded discussion usually refers to Web-based facilities that allow you to post a message for people to read at their convenience. You could create a bulletin board with other youth centers or nonprofit groups in your area to exchange messages about sources for supplies that you can share or exchange. The main difference between an electronic mailing list and bulletin board is that people receive list postings right in their email inboxes; the messages are "pushed" to them. Bulletin board formats require users to "go" to them—to get on the Web and type in an address and read each message. Some people prefer the format and organization capabilities of a bulletin board. The best online dialogues combine the two tools and allow the user to choose.

• Newsgroup is a specific kind of bulletin board. Newsgroups are one of the older components of the Internet and existed long before the Web. The history of USENET provides a fascinating peek at some of the values and ideas that helped shape the creation of the Internet and online community building today. It's worth a look. See the resource section below for more information on USENET.

We also urge you to build your own communities by creating and maintaining email lists of your own. It's easy to do on a small scale, and you can help the kids create their own lists.

Other Messaging Applications

Email is by far the most popular and important way to communicate in the networked world. In addition, you may want to introduce the kids to some other techniques that are becoming increasingly common. In fact, much of their popularity is among young people, so even if you don't spend much time on them in your classes, it's good to cover them in your discussions of safety on the Internet.

• Chat refers to a variety of programs that allow people to type back and forth in real time. Unlike email, where you send a message and then wait for the other person to read it and reply, with chat everyone is online at the same time, like a telephone conference call. Some Web sites have chat rooms, in which everyone else is online simultaneously, and chat programs allow you to contact specific people to create your own conversations with friends or associates. When you use them, communication is instantaneous—you can even see each letter as people type. Chat programs can be a great tool for collaboration and holding online conferences. Most chat software is free and can be downloaded from the Internet.

• Instant Messaging (IM) applications allow you to find out whether someone is online at the moment and contact them with a request to chat, exchange email or otherwise communicate. They're like a pager for your computer. Like chat software, most IM software is free and can be downloaded from the Internet.

• Voice communication is possible over the Internet if you have the right software and hardware. You can actually make long distance phone calls for free if everything is set up right.

• Groupware is a broad term referring to a variety of software applications that allow you to work collaboratively with other people. It can include functions that let people work on the same documents together, tracking changes as they are made, all the way up to more sophisticated functions that support messaging, conferencing and process management. Some application software includes groupware-type functions, but full-blown collaboration packages usually have to be purchased separately or as additional services from ISPs.