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Example 1. You are a teacher looking for content that can be used in the study of the Spanish conquest. You find a Web site that has excellent biographies of the cultural leaders, profiles of the different native cultures, and even some patterns for ceremonial masks that can be reproduced for a class activity. You e-mail several of your friends about your ideas to incorporate some of the site's materials into your curriculum plan. The important aspect of your communication, as opposed to information provided by a simple web search, is that you shared your ideas as a teaching professional as well as a link to the Web site. If, instead, you post your finds with your ideas for implementation to a Web log equipped with RSS generation capability, you provide a unique information source that can be accessed by thousands of teachers like you that are looking for ways to improve their learning environments. In essence, you have helped to establish an online community of practice specific to teachers of social studies. We all have unique experiences and solutions that can benefit others. There are no rules that say only professional textbook publishers should be allowed to create or suggest how to use curriculum materials. Example 2. You are teaching a class in science fiction and its parallels to developing technology. You teach this class each term and want to use timely examples. Like most instructors, the time you have available for searching out new technologies on the Web is limited. So, you subscribe to a free news feed from Sci-Fi Today that brings the latest news in science and science fiction to your desktop news reader. Example 3. You are the superintendent of a school district with 49 schools. Each school maintains a Web site but it is very time consuming to visit each Web site periodically to review each schools news and events. The schools begin to post their news to a Web log that is incorporated into each school's Web site, much like Bryant Elementary School in Seattle, Washington. The weblog tool also produces an RSS news feed. You install a news reader and subscribe to each news feed. Each day you can quickly review all the news and events at each school in one place without having to visit all 49 Web sites. Example 4. You are a researcher working on an archaeological dig on a Greek island. You have uncovered an artifact that puzzles you. You post your progress each day to a weblog. You include a picture of the puzzling artifact. The next day you are contacted by a German archaeologist that you have never met. He subscribes to your project news feed along with news feeds from other similar digs. He was on his way to a conference in Cairo and was browsing his news headlines on his PDA. He tells you the object is a physician's instrument. Now, with a potential context, you are better able to interpret some epigraphic fragments you have collected.

INTRODUCTION So, you're still getting those 1,670,000+ responses to your search queries on the Web, and you're still too busy to do anything about it, like reading the lengthy, and sometimes confusing, "help" screens to find out how to improve your searching techniques. Look no further! Real help is here, in the USCB Library's BARE BONES Tutorial. You can zip through these lessons in no time, any time. They are very short and succinct; each can be read in a few minutes. Feel free to jump in wherever you like, skip what you don't want to read, and come back whenever you need to. The information contained in the following lessons is truly "bare bones," designed to get you started in the right direction with a minimum of time and effort. For more comprehensive and detailed help on searching the Web, consult our recommended list of sites in Lesson 20 at the end of this tutorial.