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. The data is delivered to the computer in a matter of seconds and the information comes in many different forms. A computer with access to the World Wide Web can deliver text, audio, video and still images from servers located around the world.
Internet access changes even the most resource poor classrooms into information rich environments.
Web sites like the World Factbook , the National Gallery of Art , NASA , the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the United States Census Bureau provide classrooms with rich resources for learning. In addition, it is possible to save all of this information on the hard drive of the teacher's workstation. This information can be easily retrieved at a later date without the need to log onto the Internet. One of the major benefits of the Internet is that it allows individuals to access up to date information. It is possible to access news reports hours or even minutes after an event occurs.