Internet in the Classroom

Wiki

My wiki will be similar to Mrs Bradshaw’s wiki on planting seeds @

http://www.wikigardening.com/wiki/Digging_Around:Main_page

She explores some of the passions of growing things as well as some of the pitfalls.  She also discusses the tolerances of various plants to the sun and the shade.  This gives me ideas of how I want to layout my wiki.

 

Podcasts

http://www.readingrockets.org/podcasts/classroom/ is about anticipation guides.  It is useful for pre-readers.  It gives them a purpose for reading and seeks information to activate their prior knowledge.  The teacher has to provide questions that the students will be able to answer after completing the story. 

 

http://www.bookwink.com/ is a 3-minute book talk.  The speaker, a former librarian by the name of Sonja Cole.  She is enthusiastic and energized.  Students will be excited to hear her rendition.

 

 

Social Bookmarking Site

www.Pinterest.com and www.lessonplanet.com/article/elementary-art/integrating-art-into-other-content-areas  are both websites that keep children engaged.  They both integrate arts and crafts into  math lessons.  They contain various activities and games.

Widgets
The two widgets on my blog are for younger elementary. They help build literary skills.

 

Throughout the summer semester, we were exposed to numerous technological products.  Once you create an Instructional Management Document, it can be used repetitively within the classroom.  I had an opportunity to practice mail merge which I plan to use for Christmas cards and compressing large amounts of data into zipped files.  In addition to PowerPoint, the Instructional Design Assignment was another piece of presentation software.  Through Zoho Documents, we input multimedia into an instructional design.  With the Web Assessment, we reviewed mobile learning apps and gave a description of them in Google documents.  We worked in a group to develop a presentation of Digital Citizenship.  It contained valuable information that demonstrated responsible online citizenship.  We created a Wiki for our own classrooms.  The purpose was to encourage students to collaborate and benefit from peer interaction.  Becoming knowledgeable of the software products was quite enlightening.  It allows us to choose the most appropriate software for the task being performed.

The Web Resource Evaluations allowed us to analyze information from the internet.  We considered the validity of several sites.  First we had to inspect its content and examine the reasoning of the articles.  Did it make sense?  Was it professionally written? Was it possible?  Then we had to determine if it was biased.  Many articles have a preference and try to convince the reader of their beliefs.  In developing our classroom evaluations, it was imperative to guide students into checking for the authors name and their group affiliations.  This assignment made me more conscience of fraudulent sites.

I will be reminded of The Technology Site Review Assignment the next time I have to provide input on purchases.  I observed and learned a great deal on various hardware.  I like that the rule of thumb is to use at least 40 percent of the resources for professional development.  Nothing is more frustrating than having something new and exciting and not knowing how to use it.  I saw things I want to order to make life simpler.  I obtained some great ideas.  In addition, the speaker provided valuable information which may inspire us to write grants.  Teachers have to be resourceful.