Chat Groups | Going Further
		Going Further IRC chat is probably relatively worthless as a general educational tool. One only needs to tune in to typical IRC chat channels to quickly appreciate the banality of the conversation. An important exception is that IRC chat can serve as a "live" means of communication during war or large-scale natural disaster when regular news channels may be delayed in reporting information. You may wish to consider developing IRC chat capability for such events. We have given you sufficient orientation in the initial section of this chapter to get started with IRC and evaluate for yourself whether it can be of use in your classroom. Having said that, we believe that chat can be a useful general educational tool provided it is controlled enough to keep it on topics of educational interest and on topics that are appropriate for K-12 students. There are two basic ways to implement this: (1) employ chat channels set up by others specifically for K-12 education purposes, and (2) set up your own chat server, which then allows you full control of chat sessions. An example of the former is KidLink IRC, which can be accessed using an IRC client program like Ircle, or also using Telnet. KidLink requires registration for participation, and is separate from the usual IRC networks. Other controlled chat session designed specifically for children may be found at CyberKids and KidsCom. We have discussed in the section on setting up your own chat server how you can set up chat sessions that you can control, both by your choices in distributing its IP address, and more directly by the capability to monitor the chat and block participation from particular addresses. One interesting possiblity that was discussed in the section on setting up your own chat groups was chat with classrooms in other cities or other countries. To implement such ideas you need to find other teachers interested in this possibility. There are Web sites and Mail Lists devoted to this topic. An example of a Web site is this one for schools in Israel looking for international pen-pals (which are also often called key-pals on the network). An example of a Mail List is the International Email Classroom Connections mailing list, which serves as a "meeting place for teachers seeking partner classes for international and cross-cultural electronic mail exchanges." To subscribe, send email to [email protected] with the word "subscribe" in the subject line (you do not have to put anything in the body of the message). You will receive an automatic reply by email with a welcome and instructions. (This list is oriented toward an entire class of email partners in an international or cross-cultural context, not individual pen-pals; there are also many mailing lists and Web sites concerned with establishing individual electronic pen-pals). Finally, you can use search engines to look for potential partner schools for chat, email, or newsgroups. For example try this search, which uses the string key-pals pen-pals +k-12 which you could also just type directly into Alta Vista (try it; you may also want to try modifying the search string to customize the search using the tips in finding things). Finally, remember common sense and Internet safety. In dealing with these means of Internet communication never disclose, or allow a child to disclose, the child's home address or telephone number in email, newsgroup, or chat communication.