Chapter 6: Teaching with Educational Websites and Other Online Resources

Focus Question: What are WebQuests and virtual field trips?

WebQuests are online inquiries by students—designed and guided by teachers.  Students visit sited pre-identified by a teacher and assess what presentations to share with their classmates.

Designing a successful WebQuest consist of stage setting (introduction), task (activities), process (instructions), evaluation (assessment or rubrics), and conclusion.  When being designed it must be considered the capabilities of the students, primary goals to teach, ability levels working cohesively, and is technology integrated seamlessly into the assignment?

Virtual fieldtrip take students to places all over the world without ever leaving their school’s classroom or computer lab.  Museums, science centers, historical sites, and other educational organizations have developed online field trips an example found at the cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc.

TechTool 6.2 Social Bookmarking

Goodreads is an online bookmarking tool for organizing your favorite books, books you want to read, and books you did not like.  After rating so many books, the website starts to generate suggestions that you can add to your reading list or select “not interested” to make it go away.  I am in love with this website!  I’m always making and losing book lists, and now I can have it all in one place.  I give this site an A+!  It has a strong authority, is accurate, objective, current, covers several genres, and is easy to navigate.

By barbourians on Flickr

Delicious is a resourceful website for bookmarking other websites.  Add a pin to the bookmark bar on the web browser and it is instantly useful for all your bookmarking needs.  It organizes the bookmarks by “tags” that can then be searched.  This is handy but it’s also frustrating.  The tags have to be easily memorized to know what you’re looking for.  I would love to be able to organize my links by folders or boards so that I could browse a certain subject, like on pinterest but pinterest also fails in that I wish they had tags that searched only your boards.

Summary & Reflection

This chapter was just an overwhelming amount of information, and has lots of useful links.  It really opens up the classroom to the internet with WebQuests, virtual field trips, interactive maps, videoconferencing, and websites created by universities.  It also points out that filing things away with paper is a flawed system.  Things get lost, misplaced, and outdated so quickly.  With using online bookmarking, I can organize all the websites I find to incorporate into lesson plans.

WebQuests and online virtual field trips are resourceful tools for any subject. I love the fact that teachers are taking the curriculum and creating fun internet scavenger hunts to relevant materials for today.  I’m looking forward to exploring WebQuests and how I can develop something that is interactive, exploratory, and engaging. 

Chapter 5: Researching and Evaluating Internet Information

Focus Question: What are search engines and how do they work?

Search engines retrieve information from the internet.  They can be explored using keywords, which are words or phrases used by search engines to locate matching Web pages.  As shocking as it may seem, because of Google’s popularity, it has been estimated that less than half of the web is searchable in Google.

An important part to conducting research is taking notes.  Notestar offers internet-based electronic note-taking… another option is Office OneNote 2010.

Google has revolutionized how people search today, compared to the old “crawler” systems that advertisers found ways to trick the algorithms that ranked sites by keyword indicators.  Today we have search engines that allow us to view in free-text search (shows results that include 1+ keywords in phrases), Keyword/ exact math search (retrieves only resources that contain exactly the word or phrase used), Boolean search (customize search using “or, and, not” to include or exclude keywords).

Tech Tool: Photo and Audio Resources on the Web

Flickr is an online photo-sharing tool that can be beneficial to teachers and students.  The authority of the website is easy to find and even a nice help option.  This is not an information-based website, but an image based website.  Even though there is an option to find only CC photos, they cannot prevent people from uploading photos that are not their own intellectual property.  There is no objectivity to be found on this site either.  The website is up-to-date with a copyright of 2012 and a daily traffic of users. Based on the uses of AAOCC I give this website a low A because it is hard to monitor plagiarism.  Esthetically I am not pleased with the website.  It is jumbled, confusing, and has little direction of how to use it.  It was great for looking photos up but there seems to be a large learning curve for newcomers who want to contribute images.

Photo by ** Lucky Cavey ** on Flickr

Librivox offers free audio recordings of published books that are in the public domain.  The authority and about section can be found under more info.  The accuracy and objectivity is subjective to the content of what the public domain books and other materials contain.  Dates are hard to find (if at all) and coverage is minimum. Based off of AAOCC I give this site a B with lack in currency and coverage.

Summary & Reflection

The internet has gone through many improvements in the past decades.  Search engines have gone from “crawler” systems to searches that produce results that are more accurate.  I have experienced this growth in search engines.  It would be expected that “regular” search engines would not produce proper results for children.  This causes a lot of work on a teacher’s end. Fortunately, there are many kid search engines like www.askkids.com, kids.yahoo.com, and more.  I particularly remember using yahoo kids when I was in middle school and remember having resourceful information for my age group.  Schools have found other ways to prevent kids from stumbling upon inappropriate information by using filtering software and partitions.  This can sometimes cause problems though when resourceful websites are blocked. 

Introduction

Hi, my name is Hillary and I am from Naples, Florida in the United States of America.  I am going to school to become an elementary and/ or a middle school teacher. I love working with children and have an almost 2-year-old daughter named Sarina.

There are many things to do in my city.  From my house, I can drive 10 miles west and visit our local zoo and our beautiful beaches, or I can travel 15 miles east and explore one of my nation’s national parks, the everglades.  I personally enjoy going to the public parks with my daughter year round because it does not snow in Florida as we are in a subtropical zone.

At home, I love to relax by crafting, baking, and watching TV or reading a fictional book.  Sewing clothes and crocheting blankets are some of my favorite crafts.  Some of my favorite dishes are black beans and rice, deep-fried hot wings, pot roast, and empanadas.  My favorite TV shows are True Blood, Dexter (filmed in nearby Miami), Royal Pains, and Being Human.  My all-time favorite book series is Harry Potter, but I am currently reading Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.

Photo Credit to  Milan.Boers on Flickr

Here is the Naples Beach Peer

Photo Credit to me
An egret in the Everglades swamp

Photo Credit to me
A moth hanging from a flower

Chapter 4: Inspiring Student Learning with Technology

Focus Question: How can teachers create change in classrooms using technology?

Automate is using technology to reproduce existing practices (learning from computers) verses Infomate which changes existing practices (learning with computers). Type I technology applications represent the traditional uses of computers in schools (instruction and record keeping). Type II technology represents new directions in technology use (interactive and problem solving software).

Digital pen is a writing device to records what someone has written or spoken so it can be accessed on a computer that converts content into typed text that can be copied, edited, or e-mailed. It can be used to automate recordkeeping, or it can be used to infomate by capturing words and drawings and uploading them on the computer at the end of the day (and even possibly uploading them to a class website).

A tablet PC (a portable computer with touchscreen technology) can be used to simply automate by replacing books and notebooks, but can be a highly resourceful tool when used to infomate by compounding on key terms in group discussions and being posted to class websites where all the students can retrieve them.

OneNote and Google Drive are wonderful tools that provide documents that can be shared online between groups of people. These groups can then edit and compound upon the subject matter given creating unique class notes. A teacher could use this as a daily tool for students who think of questions they’d like to ask and posting it online for the teacher to review the next day. It is also a resourceful tool for groups to share their work with each other and have it all in one place.

Tech Tool: Online Technology Integration Resources

Edutopia is a wonderful website sponsored by George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars. It is a great resource to inspire innovation in teachers. It develops a community of teachers from all over who have collaborated ideas. They have a section for PBL (project based learning) that emphasizes the key steps. There are lots of resourceful links like their classroom guides andeducation downloads.

In this video from Edutopia a teacher actively engages in student centered teaching while incorporating technology that is being manipulated by both the students and the teacher.

InternationalSociety for Technology in Education seems like it would be a great resources for teachers except that it cost a substantial amount of money (about $200), and if I’ve learned anything it’s that “the best things in life are free.” Even after you’ve paid for a membership you have to continue to pay to look at resources like books and webinars.

National Council of Teacher of English is a professional association of educators in English Studies, Literacy, and Language Arts.  Once again this is a website that requires a paid membership; however, this one is substantially cheaper at $50. Is it a $50 well spent though? Depending on how much you think the content is worth it may be, but I cannot view it without paying. The cost for viewing the webinars is $295 member/$595 nonmember for 8 videos.

Chapter Summary &Connection

The teaching style throughout this chapter was focused on student centered teaching and how we can incorporate technology with that instead of automating technology with the old ways.

• As teachers we can make power points, but are we engaging our students and involving them in the process?
• Video recordings have always been a favorite among students but are we using it to enhance a lesson or teach the lesson? We need to be careful not to allow ourselves fall into mundane habits.
• We can use digital cameras, digital thermometers, Excel, e-mail, AIM, blogger, and other resources to enhance our students experience in the classroom.

I have no doubt that I will be an inside-out kind of teacher (appropriation stage) when it comes to its use in my daily life and in the classroom. I already use technology in all of my classes that I can’t see it being any other way. My computer is truly my technology based office. I can’t wait to start the invention stage of technology and developing my own wiki. I love using blogger and all these technologies in the classroom, I feel like it really adds to my experience.

As I am coming into teaching where being technologically suave is asked of us I don’t feel like I’ll have problems incorporating it into my lesson plans. If anything I always love a good challenge.

Because of digital inequality I’m sure I’m going to have times where I feel stunted by my ability to reach all my students. If I can engage all my students in the classroom, with no negative repercussions for lack of internet outside of the classroom then I think I’ll do good. Even though I have been exposed to computers my whole life I have not always had the privilege of having a working computer or the internet at home. For several years we only had my dad’s “work computer” on an old dial up system that I was not allowed to touch. It wasn’t till I was 13 that I used the internet freely outside of school. I had to be disciplined and use my time in the library and at school wisely to get the work I needed to do on the computer done.

One-to-one laptop computing would be a dream, but it still depends on the teacher on how it’s used. For now the One/Two/ Three time seems like an excellent practice of rotating groups and giving specialized attention while working on the multiple intelligences of students.