IT update

Thinking of how you can use the Internet in your teaching? Wondering how on earth you can find the time to wade through the millions of sites? Well, here are a few hints and tips of key sites and ways in which to speed things up.

Bizled Internet

Resources Catalogue

http://www. bi.zed. ac. uk/listserv/list home.htm

Your key to finding quality sites. This catalogue has been created by subject experts who have located, assessed and described quality sites and organised them so that you can simply use a keyword search or browse through the various categories.

Hint: if you're waiting for a web page to appear, save time by opening up another browser window, in Netscape just click on the Find menu and select New.You can then carry on looking for other sites. To flip between the two windows, press the alt key and the shift key simultaneously.

Worldwide

Organisations IMF

http. /www. imf org/ World Bank

http://www. worldbank. org/

OECD

http://www. oecd. org/

All three of these sites provide excellent source material on development, international finance and related issues. Take half an hour to browse through the indexes and pick out documents which will provide up to date data.

Hint: if your access to the Internet is a bit limited, then simply cut and paste the information from the Internet into a text editor or something like Word. To do this, select the text by pressing your left mouse button and dragging it over the text you want, it will highlight it for you. Then go to the Edit menu on the top toolbar and select copy. Open up your text editor (you might have word pad on your computer?) and select the paste function. You might find that right clicking on your mouse will produce a menu with the paste option on it. You should now have the text from the web site on your text editor, save the file, acknowledge the source (you should check out the copyright situation as you would with any paper based resource). You now no longer need to be online to read and use the information.

Banking & Finance HM Treasury

http://www. hm-treasury. org. uk/

Bank of England

http: //www.bankofengland. co. uk/

Qualisteam Banking Web sites http:///www. qualisteam. com/eng/ind ex. htmL

Three good sources to start finding banking and finance information. The Treasury site is regularly updated and contains a wealth of detail concerning the Monetary Policy Committee, the budget and all of the Chancellor's speeches.

The Qualisteam site is the English language version of the original French site which claims to point users to over 1000 of the worlds' banks.

Hint: to speed things up and save on download time, explore your browser's menus to find the option to turn off the images. Each time you ask for a new page, it not only asks for the text but each image as well, so you can imagine that if there are lots of images on a page, which make it look nice, but don't add any information, you don't really want to be paying for them as well! On Netscape 4 you can find this option on the Edit menu; select Preferences; select Advanced Options and then untick the Autoload Images option. It will be different on each browser version.

Catherine Sladen is Biz/ed

co-ordinator at the Institute

for Learning and Research

Technology at the

University of Bristol.

Copyright Economics and Business Education Association Autumn 1998
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