One of the best features of the Internet is its educational value.

Children – and adults – can learn in a way that is more exciting than most lessons or lectures. You get the chance to concentrate on what interests you, and your learning is enhanced by a range of audio-visual treats such as interactive pictures, sound effects or video clips. In fact, the Internet is probably the best ‘multimedia’ learning system available.

Better still, you’re free to go at your own pace. You don’t have to keep up with others, or wait for them if they are slower to understand than you.

Find material that matches ‘your level’
Most school textbooks are set at an ‘average’ level which can leave behind children with slower learning abilities, while boring those able to go faster, quicker. On the Internet, children can easily locate educational material at the right learning stage for them, and if they can’t find what they want, all they have to do is join a chat room or post a Usenet message and someone will have a suggestion for them within hours, if not minutes. Such a sharing of information just isn’t as easy in the ‘real world’ of books and paper.

The wealth of information
Pull together the shelves, draws, storage rooms and notice boards of every public library in Britain and you still won’t have enough room to house the amount of information available on the Internet. In fact, at the beginning of 2000, there were more than two billion accessible pages on the Net, with the amount growing by some seven million every day – that’s 80 pages per second. The volume of material is immense and a significant proportion holds something of interest for adults as well as for children trying to learn.

So, where do you start?

• A good and very familiar starting point is BBC Online. It has a vast array of educational pages designed for all ages and learning abilities. An excellent resource for teachers. Try the BBC’s brilliant Dinosaur World for a colourful introduction to life on prehistoric Earth.

• Encyclopaedias are another good starting point – and the world’s most famous one, Britannica now has its own website. The online version is even richer and more informative than the popular set of books because the publishers have made real creative use of the Web’s multimedia capabilities. If you need more specialist information or greater depth, Britannica provides a host of links to take you just where you want to be.

Get familiar with search engines
The great advantage of the Internet also tends to be its major drawback. The choice of educational resources is vast. But no matter what educational resource you and your children refer to, at some stage you will have to use a search engine.

Make sure your kids don’t miss out on the Web’s potential. Learn how to use search engines properly.

Each of the search engines and directories, like Yahoo, Alta Vista, Looksmart and Ask Jeeves, provide a guide on how to conduct a search. Sometimes this is listed as ‘help’ and it’s worth exploring because you will dramatically improve your search results.

As an example, consider a search for a 15-year-old GCSE student writing a report for her business studies course. A search for ‘business studies’ would find almost 35,000 pages. But by using the plus sign and adding extra phrases, you can limit your search.

In this example ‘business studies + GCSE + report writing’ produces a list of only 60 pages. Tips like this can make searching much more manageable.