Businesses have taken over large areas of the Internet. Individuals, small businesses, and global corporations are using the Internet to support their present customers and to find new ones. Advertising dominates large portions of the World Wide Web and is almost impossible to avoid. Enticing banner ads are ubiquitous. Students using search engines like AltaVista and Lycos to conduct research will find ads displayed on almost every page of these and many other popular web sites.
Ads distract students from the content that is the focus of the lesson.
Cleverly constructed ads entice students to click on links that lead to web pages far removed from the original web site. The focus of the lesson is disrupted and no learning takes place. Ironically, the school is helping businesses to pay for this distraction by providing the network and workstations the advertisers are using to reach the students. As I have indicated, there are many obstacles to the effective use of the Internet in the newly wired classrooms in schools across America, but there are still many reasons why a teacher should take advantage of the Internet. Ready access to millions of pages of data represents a major breakthrough for educators.