These features are labeled in the picture below:. The menu bar, located at the very top of the screen, can be accessed using the mouse. Actions that are in black can be performed, while actions that cannot be performed will be in gray or lightened.
The submenus provide keyboard shortcuts for many common actions, allowing you to implement the functions faster than using the mouse. The tool bar is located at the top of the browser; it contains navigational buttons for the Web. Basic functions of these buttons include:. The status bar is located at the very bottom of the browser window. The Internet can function as an invaluable resource in community health and development.
In this section, you will learn how to use the Internet to gather and distribute information, to effectively communicate with others, and to gain support and credibility in conducting community projects. The Internet is the largest and most comprehensive storehouse of information and knowledge ever assembled, and represents the largest communication network the world has ever known. With the click of a mouse, or a Smartphone , you can update your Facebook status or send a Tweet and reach thousands of people all across the globe.
You can also work collaboratively with someone you may never meet in person, read an article on most any subject, or scan the contents of the world's largest libraries. You can also get a huge array of false information. It's important to be aware of the reliability of the source of any information you get online. If you have any question about it, check out the information with other sources before you assume that it's accurate.
Even reliable sites - the New York Times or major universities, for instance - make mistakes from time to time. The difference is that they generally correct themselves as soon as they find the error, while less reliable sites may intentionally persist in error, or simply may not bother to change their information once it's posted.
There are different kinds of Internet-based tools you might use, and different purposes you might use them for:. To learn how to do the work. The Community Tool Box is an example, but there are many others that can provide guidance as you plan your work, start a coalition, raise money, gain participation, etc.
To gather information. This obviously includes a broad range of possibilities - not only websites, but also chat and newsgroups, on-line publications, library catalogues, and other on-line resources.
Some of the most common types of information you might be seeking:. To communicate with others. The Internet allows you to communicate with people from all over the world in a short time, through e-mail, Skype, Twitter, instant messaging, etc. Among the reasons you might want to do so are:. To distribute educational or informational material to participants. Many university courses use the Community Tool Box as text, for instance, or send students directly to the Community Tool Box site for course reading.
To conduct business. Non-profit and grass roots organizations, like many individuals, use the Internet to find and contact suppliers; comparison shop; order materials, equipment, and supplies; pay bills; advertise positions; and sell or publicize services and products.
To engage in advocacy. The Internet can be invaluable to an advocacy effort. E-mail, websites, listservs, and discussion groups allow an advocacy group to organize, mobilize members for action, contact policy makers, conduct advocacy research, and educate a constituency, as well as the general public, about an issue. First, the scope: the Internet is truly international, and knows no borders. Even in places where there is no electricity, there is the possibility of Internet access by satellite and with the use of solar powered computers.
That means that virtually anyone can gain access to the vast store of information and potential in cyberspace, and can communicate with others in faraway places. Such power can be misused - terrorists take advantage of the Internet all the time, for example - but it can also create previously unimaginable opportunities for economic, social, political, intellectual, and human development.
There are, of course, some limitations here. One is the availability of hardware. Certainly, the poor, especially in developing nations, are unlikely to own computers - a laptop represents considerably more than a year's income for a family in many countries - but they may have access to them through non-governmental organizations NGOs , government projects, schools, or other channels.
In general, the issue of access is a serious one for a good proportion of the world's population. Perhaps an equally severe barrier is that of literacy. Probably a majority of the world's low-income population perhaps even a majority of the world's total population is either completely or functionally illiterate, and even many who are literate are not fluent in English or one of the other languages common to most Internet sites.
Translation is one answer, but the sweep of available material is so vast - websites number in the billions, and increase daily - that it is difficult to imagine anything short of truly effective translation software addressing the problem.
The literacy issue is even thornier, since much of the planet's illiterate population has very little opportunity for school, and very little support - governmental or otherwise - for changing their situation. That said, there still remain billions of people who can benefit directly by use of the Internet, and billions more who can be helped by it as a result.
Second, by its very nature, the Internet is almost certainly the most democratic medium ever devised. Access to the vast majority of its sites is free. Its size and scope are such that anyone who can get online can learn nearly anything. No one is denied the right to say what she wishes, to contact whomever she wishes, or to go almost anywhere she wants electronically, at least by the restrictions of the Internet itself. Furthermore, the nature of the medium makes it possible for a message to be transmitted to a recipient anywhere in the world, or for that same message to reach thousands, or even millions, of people in a very short time.
The Internet eliminates not only the physical barriers of time and space, but social ones as well. Anyone's words can be sent to anyone else, and judged solely by their content, rather than by the sender's appearance or apparent social standing. Everyone is equal, at least in some respects, at the keyboard.
There are governments that monitor and limit Internet use for political reasons. It is difficult for them to stop every activity they'd like to, but the threat of being caught undoubtedly keeps many of their citizens from roaming freely.
In some cases, these governments are able to cut off access to large parts of the system, but people continue to find ways around the barriers. Given these two outstanding characteristics of the Internet - its huge size and its democratic nature - there are a number of reasons why Internet-based tools have enormous potential for health and community development.
The short - and accurate - answer here is everyone. The internet is particularly useful for those who want to reach out to many people in a short time. Since , the University of Kansas Center for Community Health and Development has been building the Community Tool Box as a free, Internet-based resource for health and community development. In order to create as nearly complete a resource as possible, the Tool Box team first tried to understand the building blocks of health and community work.
What do you have to know and do first, and where do you have to go from there, in health and community work, in order to foster change that will lead to an improvement in the quality of community members' lives?
We came up with a framework for health and community work that includes five components:. Each of these five components is in turn split into a number of core competencies a total of 16 in all that further define each component and divide the work into manageable elements.
We'll look at each of the five components and its core competencies separately, but first, we'll call attention to three basic assumptions - guiding principles - that run through the Community Tool Box. There might be various levels of involvement, from consultation to full partnership. There are, realistically, times when participatory process simply isn't possible. Time may be too much of the essence - people's lives may be at stake, as in an emergency relief effort or a military operation.
Some of the people you want to involve may be so immovable that there's simply no point in trying to include them. That's rarer than most people think, but it does happen: religious and ideological fundamentalists, particularly, may be unwilling to consider the possibility that others' ideas or positions might be legitimate.
In those circumstances, participatory process isn't the best idea. Servant leadership and collaborative leadership both assume the leadership of a participatory process. The context of a health or community issue encompasses the history, culture, character, and economic, social, and political makeup of the community itself; the nature of the issue and its relevance to and frequency in the community or population in question; the culture, size, attitudes, and other characteristics of the target population; and the personalities involved in all these areas, and their relationships to one another.
Six core competencies, or fundamental abilities, contribute to the work of understanding context and collaborative planning:. Community action and intervention. Once you've engaged in community assessment and used the results to formulate a plan, you have to take action in order to effect change. Action plans should flow from the overall strategy you've come up with, and should be aimed at producing the outcomes that a collaborative planning process has identified as important.
Your action should, to the extent possible, involve all sectors of the community, and encompass the diversity of the community. To these ends, three core competencies fall under this component of health and community development:.
Community and system change. Bringing about permanent change in a community entails more than simply creating and running an intervention. The intervention may have an immediate effect on the issue you're concerned with, but that's rarely enough. In order to bring about permanent change, you often have to change both the systems that affect it - e. In order to make these kinds of changes, you may have to take a multi-pronged approach, working with several sectors of the community at once.
Three core competencies help in this endeavor:. Widespread behavior change and improvement in population-level outcomes. How do we affect the behavior of enough people in enough places to improve overall outcomes? Changing population-level outcomes requires changing the behaviors of large numbers of people.
In order to accomplish this, states, communities, and organizations may employ social marketing efforts that include promotional messages, and that incorporate environmental changes that make the desired behaviors easier and more rewarding. To increase civic engagement, a campaign might include media messages that emphasize the beneficial consequences of citizen involvement, easier access to voting through simplified registration, more neighborhood polling places, free transportation to the polls, etc.
One core competency supports this component:. Sustaining the effort. As the Community Tool Box continually emphasizes, the work of health and community development is never really done. Once an intervention is launched, it has to be maintained over time for as long as it's needed. Real community change - change that involves system and attitude changes, policy change, etc. Even once it's accomplished, it still needs to be maintained if you don't want to lose ground.
Both the work and the funding have to continue, or you'll never reach and your ultimate goal of an improvement in the lives of community members.
The final three core competencies are aimed at keeping it all going indefinitely, or for as long as is necessary. We believe that the Community Tool Box is the most comprehensive capacity-building tool available on the Internet, both in the breadth of its vision and in the sheer volume of the information it provides.
However, as we've discussed in this section, there are countless other tools of various types available in cyberspace, and most of them provide information or services that the Community Tool Box doesn't. Explore the CTB, but explore other options as well, especially if you're looking for specific information - census data, methods of doing your work, research results, etc.
The spirit in which the civilian Internet was created was one of cooperation and idealism. Its founders believed that it would be the most democratic communication medium in history, and that there would be opportunities for almost anyone to learn or teach almost anything. In that spirit, our goal is not to compete with other websites, but rather to help your organization become the best and most effective practitioner of health and community development possible.
If we all work together, and use Internet-based tools well, we can help make the world a better place, one community at a time. The Internet is a vast storehouse of information and expertise, where community builders can find instruction, data, links to others with similar concerns, funding possibilities, and just about anything else they need to engage in their work.
Internet-based tools for health and community development - websites like the Community Tool Box that provide information and instruction; university sites; government sites; newspaper and other media sites; online encyclopedias and databases; listservs, and other sites that allow communication among community builders - can all contribute mightily toward doing the work. Students should be encouraged to carefully evaluate sources found on the Internet. The evaluation tool below will help students analyze web resources in terms of accuracy, authority, objectivity, timeliness, and coverage.
Consideration of these factors will weed out many of the inaccurate or trivial sites students may encounter. Analyzing web resources Answer the following questions to evaluate web resources. Accuracy Are sources listed for the facts? Can information be verified through another source?
Has the site been edited for grammar, spelling, etc.? Authority Is the publisher reputable? Is the sponsorship clear? Is a phone number or postal address available? Is there a link to the sponsoring organization? Is the author qualified to write on this topic? Objectivity Does the sponsor have commercial interests?
Is advertising included on the page? Are there obvious biases? Currency Is a publication date indicated? Is there a date for the last update? Is the topic one that does not change frequently? Coverage Are the topics covered in depth? Does the content appear to be complete? Setting bookmarks on the Web Browsers such as Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer provide a way to create a list of your favorite sites that you can access with a click of the mouse.
The procedure for creating a list of sites is an easy and powerful tool for web use. When you find a web page that you want to bookmark, simply select the "Add Bookmark" or "Add Favorite" option from the menu bar. To return to the site at a later time, choose the name from the bookmark or favorite list, and you will immediately access the site. You can organize your bookmarks into file folders and can save them on a disk to transfer and use on other computers.
Copyright issues Teachers and students have a somewhat flexible, but not unlimited, copyright privilege under the "fair use clause" of the U. Copyright Act. Teachers and students are also protected to some extent by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which went into effect in October Under current guidelines, teachers and students are able to make limited use of copyrighted materials for instructional purposes.
Currently, copyright law as it relates to the Internet is vague and being challenged and rewritten on an ongoing basis. However, the guidelines of the "fair use clause" can be applied to Internet use in the classroom.
Although classroom use allows teachers and students to be creative, you must also be extremely careful. Teachers and students should realize that all materials found on the Internet are protected by the same copyright laws as printed materials.
Copyright protects "original works of authorship" that are in a tangible form of expression. Copyrightable works include the following categories: literary works musical works, including any accompanying words dramatic works, including any accompanying music, pantomimes, and choreographic works pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works motion pictures and other audiovisual works sound recordings architectural works These categories should be viewed broadly.
For example, computer programs and most "compilations" may be registered as "literary works"; maps and architectural plans may be registered as "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works. Who is the audience? How widely will the material be distributed? Will the material be reproduced? It is allowable under copyright guidelines to use copyrighted materials for class assignments. Check specific guidelines for length of time the material can be kept up on a web site.
When in doubt, ask. If you and your students find a graphic or portion of a text on the Internet that you want to utilize in a class project, locate the source of the web site and email them to ask permission for use of their graphic or text.
Many web site designers are happy for you to "borrow" their graphics and words. Some ask that you give them credit and others do not. Although your students may be too young to comprehend copyright law, they can understand the concept of respecting someone else's property. It is advisable for school sites to have an online service provider or an "agent" who can act as a filter on copyright issues.
The agent would be the person someone would notify if they found a copyright violation on a student or school web site. In most cases, you are simply asked to remove the offending copyright violation. Copyright discussions with students may include: Does copyright apply to student web pages? Any original work of authorship, whether created by a student, teacher, or professional is protected by the copyright laws.
An original piece of work does not need to possess or display a copyright to be protected under the copyright laws. May students "borrow" art, sound, animation, etc.
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