All spheres of modern life are influenced by the technical innovations, developed for the last ten years. Medical care is not the exception. Different types of medical equipment are used during curing for many years. The innovations in the educational sphere have come later. Today the software and other innovations allow using Internet in the educational process.
There is a tendency to use the Second Life program in nursing education. To provide the training in real time with real situations became. Moreover, this program helps to be ready to cope with people and cooperate in different situations. Second Life is the computer stimulator, the information may be given through it and also necessary skills may be practiced in online reality. Furthermore, the theoretical knowledge of students is applied in practice and the opportunity to be more assure in the abilities while real life practice appears.
The lessons from using this online stimulator are as follows, the situation is evaluated independently and the decision is provided by students; in the case of wrong decision, the experience from the situation will give the opportunity not to be mistaken for the next time. The fact that students become familiar with the networking opportunities and multiuser environment is one more advantage of using Second Life stimulator during the education (Skiba, 2007).
The implication of the program usage is providing some experiments and seeing the outcomes without harming people’s health. Education is the time when some mistakes may be made by students, and the help to cope with these mistakes is provided by online stimulator. The real life is severer and the opportunity will never appear to reboot it and restart the treatment in real life again. The only thing which can de suggested is the usage of the Second Life on the early periods of education.
There is a lot of information about children’s asthma online, the information is divided mostly on reliable and unreliable. To find the reliable and trusted information about children’s asthma online, eliminating newspaper and journal articles, was the purpose of the search. To choose the searching system, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL or Lycos was the first step in information finding (Bull et al, 2005). Using Google.com, the keywords, “Asthma in Children”, were inserted in the appeared window and then the links were looked through and reliable information searched for. The most reliable sources, in our opinion, were cited (edu. and gov. sites are considered to be trusted). The reliability of the sources was checked by the site content, name and address. All the elements of the site could be retried through the links in the site itself (Bull et al, 2005).
Medline Plus (2008), Bupa (2008) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2009) are some of the found sites, where necessary information was found and which can be trusted. The multimedia is very important on the medical sites as it is not always possible to understand what the point of the article without visual assistance is. Moreover, the seen information is better perceived than read. The qualitative video is available on the found Bupa site.
The detailed investigation of the CHESS information was offered by Gustafson et al (2002) and it may be used as the example for evaluating the information, which is available online. The content of the site should be reliable, and should possess the information for connection with the administration. Having provided the research of the online information about children’s asthma, it was found out that there were a lot of reliable and trusted sources of information, eliminating different newspaper and journal articles which can be also available online.
Reference List
Bull, S. S., Gaglio, B., McKay, H. G., & Glasgow, R. E. (2005). “Harnessing the potential of the Internet to promote chronic illness self-management: diabetes as an example of how well we are doing.” Chronic Illness. No1. Pp. 143-155.
Bupa. Asthma in Children. (2008). Web.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children with Asthma. (2009). Web.
Gustafson, D. H., Hawkins, R. P. Boberg, E. W. McTavish, F. Owens, B. Wise, M. Berhe, H. & Pingree, S. (2002). “CHESS: 10 years of research and development in consumer health informatics for broad populations, including the underserved.” International Journal of Medical Informatics no. 65, pp. 169-177.
Medline Plus. Asthma in Children. (2009). Web.
Skiba, D. J. (2007) “Nursing Education 2.0: Second Life.” Nursing Education Perspectives. Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 156–157.