"Cool!" That's how Barbara Dawson described CTA's first-ever Cyber Café. A member of the San Bernardino Teachers Association, Dawson was one of several hundred teachers who visited the Café in early March.
Held in conjunction with this year's Good Teaching Conference in Burlingame, the Café offered teachers an opportunity to visit education-related Web sites and check their e-mail.
CTA's Cyber Cafe provides a service to teachers already familiar with the Internet and introduces the Web to those who aren't. Networking at the Good Teaching Conference are Julita Galleguillos from Salinas and Maria D. Medina and Maria McCullough from Mountain View (below).
"This gave me a chance to see the CTA Web site," Dawson says. "I had never been there before." The CTA Web site, a recent winner in the International Web Page Awards program, was prominently displayed via projector.
Roasted hazelnut coffee and chocolate-covered biscotti enticed conference participants to enter the room and try surfing the Net. Mellow piano and saxophone jazz playing in the background had some teachers tapping their toes as they keyed.
"I could have stayed all day," said Sue H. Williams, a member of Associated Pomona Teachers. "I want to get online at home - and at school!"
"The staff were friendly and helped those who needed it - while leaving those who knew what they were doing alone," said Stephanie Cobb, a member of the Fairfield-Suisun United Teachers Association.
The Cyber Café gave Alisal Teachers Association member Martin R. Cisneros an opportunity to look up references he collected at conference workshops and to network with other people.
After Café participants received an introduction to the CTA Web site, they were given instructions on how to access a number of sites of interest to teachers, all of which were "bookmarked" on the computers in advance. Paper bookmarks were handed out as reminders of the addresses.
The most popular sites were funbrain.com, which includes educational games and projects for kids of all ages, and www.search opolis.com, an educational search engine. Others included teacher vision.com, teacheruniverse.com, lightspan.com, schoolcity.com, black board.com and teachers.net.
Teachers chatted, laughed and clicked their way through a variety of sites. Some printed out curriculum suggestions, others took the opportunity to search sites of interest to them personally. San Bernardino Teachers Association member Jerry Motto confirmed a flight to England and purchased tickets to an opera online. Alvord Educators Association member Carol Robb was delighted to find the Viking Network Web site. "Once we finally get Internet access at my school, my students will love this site!"
Maria McCullough, a member of the Mountain View Teachers Association, was particularly interested in the "NEA grants/loans" section of the CTA site.
United Educators of San Francisco member Dave Margo said there was "something for everyone" on the Web.
"I surfed the Britney Spears photos for hours," he joked.
Karyn Ferrera Donhoff
