MARTHEOPHILUS TRAINING COLLEGE

ASSIGNMENT

TOPIC : CONCEPT OF INTERNET ITS UTILIZATION IN SOCIAL

SCIENCE TEACHING

SUBMITTED BY
SHAMNA M
SOCIAL SCIENCE

CONCEPT OF INTERNET

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use

a standardized protocol (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It
is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic,
business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad
array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. Through
these, an extensive range of information resources and services can be
accessed, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email, telephony,
and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United
States government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication
via computer networks. This work, combined with that of the National
Physical Laboratory in the UK for the Government of United Kingdom and
France in the United Kingdom and France, led to the primary precursor
network, the ARPANET, in the United States. The interconnection of regional
academic networks in the 1980s marks the beginning of the transition to the
modern Internet. From the early 1990s, the network experienced sustained
exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile
computers were connected to it.
The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in
the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to
worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies,
and the merger of many networks. Though the Internet has been widely used
by academia since the 1980s, the commercialization of what was by the 1990s
an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into
virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2014, 38 percent of the
world's human population has used the services of the Internet within the past

year--over 100 times more people than were using it in 1995. Internet use
grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s to early 2000s and from the late
1990s to present in the developing world.
Most traditional communications media, including telephony and television,
are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services
such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol television
(IPTV). Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website
technology, or are reshaped into blogging and web feeds. The entertainment
industry, including music, film, and gaming, was initially the fastest growing
online segment. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of human
interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social
networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers
and small artisans and traders. Business-to-business and financial services on
the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological
implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets
its own policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name
spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain
Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical
underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely
affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by
contributing technical expertise.
A means of connecting a computer to any other computer anywhere in the
world via dedicated routers and servers. When two computers are connected
over the Internet, they can send and receive all kinds of information such as
text, graphics, voice, video, and computer programs.

No one owns Internet, although several organizations the world over

collaborate in its functioning and development. The high-speed, fiber-optic
cables (called backbones) through which the bulk of the Internet data travels
are owned by telephone companies in their respective countries.
The Internet grew out of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Wide Area
Network (then called ARPANET) established by the US Department Of
Defense in 1960s for collaboration in military research among business and
government laboratories.
Later universities and other US institutions connected to it.
This resulted in ARPANET growing beyond everyone's
expectations and acquiring the name 'Internet.'
The development of hypertext based technology (called World Wide web,
WWW, or just the Web) provided means of displaying text, graphics, and
animations, and easy search and navigation tools that triggered Internet's
explosive worldwide growt
DEFINITION
A worldwide system of computer network, a network of networks in which
users at any one computer can get information from any other computer.
The word Internet exactly means network of networks. The Internet
consists of thousands of smaller regional networks spread throughout the
world. It connects approximately 80 million users in Asian countries on any
given
day.
The Internet is referred as a physical part of the global network. It is a giant
collection of cables and computers. No one owns the Internet, though there
are companies that help out to manage different parts of the networks that tie
everything together, there is no single governing body that controls what

happens on the Internet. The networks within different countries sponsor the
finance and manage according to the local procedure.

Teaching Social Studies with the Internet

Social studies educators are living and working in the middle
of a revolution -- the emergence of the Internet as an integral
part of education. This Digest summarizes ways that
classroom teachers can combine the Internet with other
instructional resources and methods. It is a basic guide for the
novice and a checklist for the more experienced Internet user.
The web sites and ERIC resources cited in this Digest and
included in the references provide the "next steps" for
exploration and implementation.
GROWTH OF INTERNET USE IN SCHOOLS.

In 1994, the federal government established a goal of linking

every school to the Internet by the year 2000. It appears that
we are very close to reaching that goal. From 1994 through
1998, the percentage of public schools with Internet
connections jumped from 35 percent to 89 percent. More
important is how the schools are connected. A dedicated line
is much faster than a dial-up connection and allows higherlevel use of the Internet. Since 1994, the percentage of
schools with dial-up connections has dropped 52 percent,
while the number of those linked by dedicated lines has risen
over 26 percent. Finally, the ratio of students per instructional
computer is fast approaching that recommended by the
President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology.
While some troubling differences in computer access and
Internet connectivity still exist between inner-city and rural

schools and suburban and medium-sized city schools, the

level of computer access for teachers and students is rapidly
improving in the United States (Rowand 1999).
USING PRIMARY SOURCES.
Teachers have long recognized the value of students reading
accounts of historical events written in the words of those who
were there. Excerpts from James Madison's journals kept
during the Constitutional Convention is a typical example of
the primary sources that teachers use to explain how the
Constitution was developed and how it is interpreted today.
But the Internet opens the way to an enormous range of
resources.
For instance, imagine reading Tacitus's eyewitness account of
the burning of Rome, including the descriptions of "terrified,
shrieking women" and "helpless old and young" fleeing the
conflagration, or Corporal E. C. Nightingale's frightening
memories from on the deck of the battleship Arizona in 1941.
Both of these are available to teachers and students at
[http://www.ibiscom.com], one of several commercial web
sites that provide superb resources for teachers and students.
The most complete web site for U.S. history teachers is the
"American
Memory"
site
[http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html]
of
the
Library of Congress. In addition to a collection of Civil War
photographs, "Voices of the Dust Bowl," and a collection of
documents from the women's suffrage movement, this site
features outstanding collections on social history. These
collections include baseball cards from 1877 to 1914, African-

American sheet music from 1850-1914, and "Buckaroos in

Paradise," a look at ranching in early Nevada. Many web sites
include photographs, songs, and even motion picture
excerpts. A Pentium-based computer and a fast Internet
connection are necessary to use these resources effectively,
but imagine the projects students can develop with them.
SCHOOL OR CLASS PORTALS.
One of the best ways to use the Internet to help students and
teachers is to create a "portal" site for a school's social
studies department. A portal is a World Wide Web site
designed to serve as a main "point of entry" to the web, and
features an extensive catalog of web sites and other Internet
resources, a search engine, or both. Portal sites for individual
grade levels, subjects, or courses are frequently part of a
school's larger portal site. Portals especially for teachers can
include links to the National Council for the Social Studies
(NCSS) site, professional development opportunities, ERIC
clearinghouses, and other resources. Student pages can
include homework assignments, a course syllabus, links to
resources specifically tailored to class assignments, and even
grading rubrics. In some communities, parents are
encouraged to use these sites to stay informed of student
assignments and school news.