Welcome to Karen's
Cyber Grrls Get On-Line! Internet Tour
And yes that's G.r.r.l.s which is, in our case, cyber-lingo for Great-Girls. Grrl is also a young at heart thing and not limited to the under 18ers.
Welcome to my user-friendly, on-line, just-for-grrls internet tour. This page is an outline I put together for my cyber grrls' one-day internet workshop. With it you too can scratch the surface of a wide variety of internet areas leaving the girls with a basic understanding of what the net is and how it can be used, even for scouting. If you click a link and leave this page, just click your Back arrow or command to return.
Once your girls get a taste of cyber scouting, I doubt they can resist asking to design their own pages to share with the world. Be warned that creating your own page can be time consuming. Not only can surfing the net be addictive but even designing for it can be. If you are looking for a more grown-up 'technical' approach to learning the in's and out's of being on-line, check out Scouting on the Internet by Jo Paoletti.
CLICK HERE for my additional resources to use with this page. These include on-line safety, a listing of what I think are the top scout web sites, and the best info on creating your own site. You should also go here if you are a newbie just beginning to surf scout & guide turf.
Section One: Background Information
For younger girls, start with how to turn the computer on and what buttons not to push. For older girls, you may go as far as comparing browsers, monitor quality and size v how things will look on different screens, modem speeds and phone line quality, setting opening pages, bookmarks, the cache, the history file, internet providers, or even free speech on the internet v acceptable surfing sites for girls/scouts/guides.
Before you start surfing, discuss the critical role some women played in computers. (Did you know it was a woman who added the numberic keypad to your keyboard for comfort and efficiency? Or that originally computer programming was strictly a career for women?)
It is important to discuss how the internet actually came about and why it is known as The Web. Read through Bruce Sterling's
A Stort History of the Internet which you can paraphrase to suit your troop's age-level. Keep in mind that this article is from 1993, well before the internet boom created by popular graphical interfaces like MS-Explorer and Netscape or providers like America On-Line and Compu-Serve. It does it's job explaining what lead up to the 'boom' though.
Microsoft Network has developed an excellent on-line Internet Tutorial. Grrls can click page to page at their own pace. It uses easy to understand graphics and has only a few key points per page. Even with a slow connection, you will be able to get through it in about 15 minutes. It makes a good handout if you would prefer to do it that way.
Wrap this section up by asking the girls how they see the future of computers and the web.
Section Two: Safety First
When your girls are ready to start exploring, take a moment to go to an on-line safety site for kids. Explain that kids shouldn't use their full names, tell addresses or phone numbers, agree to meet anyone, and their surfing should be supervised by a parent or responsible adult. Many kids are being taught this at school, but here they will have an added opportunity to actually be on-line and learn. If you send e-mail out as part of your activity, be sure to check for no full names or school names before the kids hit the Send button. Safety during 'cyber chatting' should be stressed repeatedly.
Section Three: Start Scouting the Net
Return to the Yahooligans! homepage, and explain that Yahooligans! is a search engine just for safe, kid-oriented sites. Discuss how the subject areas shown relate to the scouting Worlds of Interest (In the US this would be: World of the Arts, World of People, World of the Outdoors, World of Today and Tomorrow, World of Well-Being). Choose a World and ask the girls where they think related information could be found. One of my favorites is for the World of People. Go to Around the World then Food and Eating then World Surfari which highlights different countries each month and is very kid-friendly. If this site is gone or down, just pick another site in Yahooligan!. These sites are pretty much guaranteed to be kid-safe.
Section Four: Basic Search
You can use the Yahooligans! search tool and do a seach for Girl Scouts. Yes, the links it finds are sparse, but this will take you almost directly to the GSUSA homepage. From there you can show the girls the subject areas and send them on a search for Juliette Low, the countries included in WAGGGS, and so on. You can have your girls fill out the Just for Girls form for the interactive site that is under construction.
Did you know GSUSA is starting a new on-line bulletin board system (BBS) so information can be immediately transferred between national and the council locations? Too cool!
When you are ready to move on, you can have the girls enter a new address and go to Chris Welch's marvelous Girl Scout Resource Center which has sections for both leaders and girls. Chris is always looking for info for the Thinking Day and Recipe sections. If you want to practice sending e-mail, this would be a great place to drop a note and share what you know with other scouts/guides at the same time.
If you want your troop to get a good idea of how many girl scout/guide pages are out there, you can have them go to the Reese's
Girl Scout & Guiding Links page. Depending on the speed of your modem, it could take days to weeks to take a look at all these sites! If you have a troop page, be sure to submit your URL here. If you know of a page that has moved or been discontinued, please submit the change as well.
Our troop wrapped this section up by looking at our own Troop 250 page on-line. For many of the girls, they had only seen it via photocopies and color overheads. If you have time, show a selection of troop pages that range from the simplest to the most dazzling. As I did with my troop, this can be done by printing a few troops' pages out and passing them out at prior meetings leading up to your internet event. We used this time to share the e-mails we received through our page as well.
Section Five: Weaving Your Own Web
You may finish the day off with the girls starting to write their own web pages. Learn some of the basic HTML codes (HTML, HEAD, TITLE, BODY, Hx, EM, STRONG, CENTER, BLINK, P, BR, HR, IMG SRC, and A HREF, as well as how to write invisible messages in the script). Making a short list of these codes with descriptions and showing an example is necessary. The girls can type their masterpieces in a text based program like Microsoft Notepad, Wordpad, or Word. These should then be saved to an individual disk and pulled up with the File Open command in the browser. You do not need a live internet connection to do this, just the browser. Toggling between programs allows the girls to see exactly what each tag controls. Depending on how well they catch on, you can also add background and text colors. Since this can actually be done on any type of word processing program and saved as a .txt/.html/.htm file, you can have the girls write their scripts at home or at school and give you their disk later to upload.
Some Advice
My troop accomplished most of this in a one-day workshop from 9-4 with a two-hour lunch and several brief speakers on women, computers, and careers. Our internet connection in the lab was so slow the second half of the day that we couldn't use it. One way you can somewhat safe guard against the whole day being a waste is to clean your cache out, visit all these sites in a row, then go back to your cache and save it all to disk. This can take quite a while and you would need to hen-peck through the .HTML/.HTM files to find the right page and rename it to something recognizable. Your cache saves everything under an assigned ID code. You'll loose the graphics but the readable section of the web page can still be pulled up by your browser. (You can do the same for the graphics but you would have to rename them all to the name used in the HTML document...which would take forever and a day. Yes, there are even ways around this, called Web Whackers but I don't want to confuse any one at the beginner level.) Depending on how many girls you have and how much time you have invested in planning this, it can be worth the effort.
On our troop's link page, I have tried to find the best and favorite sites for grrls. Some are useful, some are just plain fun. Some might not work at any given time or have moved. We were trying for 250 links, just like our troop number, but sites were moving faster than we could keep up with them. We hope you and the rest of our cyber grrl visitors have a great time while you're with us. If you know of a great grrl site, let us know and we will try to get it added to the list for all our grrl-friends to enjoy.
I hope my little cyber-tour helps you and your grrls learn the joys (and frustrations) of global surfing, making cyber friends, sharing, and most of all LEARNING.
Your Cyber Sister,
Karen McNaughton
Troop 250
Girl Scout Council of Greater St. Louis
Missouri USA
LINKS FROM THE ON-LINE TOUR
Additional Tutorial Resources For This Page
Click here to check out our homepage & all it has to offer
Who are we? Visit our 'Meet and Greet' page
The Amazing Surfin Girls' Link Page to it All
Copyright © 1997 Karen McNaughton. All Rights Reserved.
May be used freely for scout and guide training purposes.
