The Internet is such a useful tool for educators. Growing up in the age of technology, I have had plenty of experience as a student and using the Internet to do research using search engines such as Google or Yahoo. I check my email account daily, pay my bills online and have a Facebook account. As a teaching intern, I have used different Internet teaching tools such as BrainPop! in the classroom as a teaching aid. However, until now I have never sat down and taken a closer look at all the various resources the Internet has to offer educators.
One site I really found to be great for use in the classroom is called Ask for Kids (http://www.askkids.com). This is a very kid-friendly, fun site where students can ask questions in a search box (I typed in 'when was the civil war' as a test question), and they will be directed to a page with links on the subject as well as a separate box where they can change/refine their search question or click on related topics (such as Robert E Lee or Battle of Bull Run). There is also a Games section including a game I found to be very educational called Trivia Archer, where students earn points by answering trivia questions in different areas such as geography, history and astronomy. Learning should be made fun and I think that this site could be a very helpful tool in doing so.
Another great site I found is called Education World (http://www.education-world.com), a site full of resources for teachers. Through this site, teachers can find lesson plans on a wide variety of topics and grade levels, get help writing newsletters, search for and purchase supplies for the classroom, download worksheets and even search for education jobs. I added this site as a bookmark on my computer, and feel that I will get a lot of use out of it in the future.
States and districts also offer plenty of online resources to teachers, and two of the sites I focused on were the Florida Department of Education (http://www.fldoe.org) and my district's site: Brevard Public Schools (http://www.brevard.k12.fl.us/). These sites both have easy to follow layouts, and provide information for teachers, parents, students and the community. As a future teacher, I focused mainly on the teacher portion of these pages. I found the district site to be a bit more user-friendly than the FLDOE main page, however both were full of useful information, links and resources. One section I found to be particularly useful was the Training & Professional Development section, which gives educators a list of different pages to improve their learning, find and register for inservices, and subscribe to educational journals in areas such as integrating technology in the classroom. Through these sites you can also access school calendars, lunch schedules and policies.
Another technology that I never really thought would be useful to me is Twitter. When I first heard about Twitter, I honestly thought that it was a silly site for people to update their friends about what they were doing (such as "I am eating ice cream" or "I just passed a big test!") much like updating a Facebook status. However, I have realized that sites like this can also have true educational value, by subscribing to groups or pages that share useful links and resources with one another.
As a future teacher, and throughout the rest of my time here in the Elementary Education program at UCF, I plan on taking advantage of the Internet and these useful sites both in and out of the classroom.
The resources mentioned in your blog will be useful to those instructors who want or do teach K-12. I am more focuses on higher education myself. I use FLDOE quite a bit for research and find it a very beneficial tool.
ReplyDeleteI have not found the benefit of using Twitter in the educational setting yet; but I am a digital immigrant, so it takes awhile to change and see the light in some of the digital tools out there.
Facebook is being used more in schools as a classroom aid for students to collaborate and share information and ideas.
~ Chrystal
I am glad you found so many great websites! I also found that many of the websites were easy to navigate, and had lots of information for parents and students. One thing that I was a little frustrated with, was the lack of actual teaching in the classroom resources. What I mean by that is lesson plans, worksheets, videos, and other tools that I could actually use in the classroom. While Florida had good information, I found that on the Indiana education website, www.doe.in.gov, they had lesson plans that went with all of their standards. You could search grade level and subject, and it would direct your from there. I was hoping a few more websites had ideas like that. Did you see any good websites like this that I might have missed?
ReplyDeleteMegan H
I do agree that “The Internet is such a useful tool for educators,” (para. 1) and its proper use will maximize learning. One of the most surprising aspect—and I must stress, a pleasant one—of this post was about the author’s view on the educational value of the Twitter. For some time, I did also view the twitter as a “silly site for people to update their friends about what they were doing” (para. 5). However, pointing out that “by subscribing to groups or pages that share useful links and resources with one another,” (para. 5) Twitter, indeed, has become more useful and a valuable educational resource.
ReplyDeleteI have also found the Education World to be a valuable site where “teachers can find lesson plans..., get help writing newsletters, search for and purchase supplies…, download worksheets…” (para. 3). Indeed such Websites along with many other resources in the Internet warrant further inclusion of technology in the classroom.
I totally agree with you Megan. The internet is such a useful tool. I also use it for paying bills, research, facebook, etc. There is so much information out there especially for teachers. During my internship I also used Brain Pop as well as many other resources to come up with creative lessons and fun activites for the students.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the Ask for Kids site as well. It is user friendly (both for teachers and students) and appears to have tons of really great information on it. The best part, I think, is that students could most likely use it themselves and help their peers!
Do you think that when students go to sites like “ask kids.com” that it’s taking away from their ability to do effective research on the web. If I ask a student when the civil war is and the first thing they do is type it into ask.com it seems as though they are not researching the topic but looking for the site that has the most related information within those search parameters. In my opinion it’s an increasingly big problem; students are relying heavily on search engine questions rather than trying to determine which site has the best information. My wife’s students in her science class will go as far as to type the entire science question into Google or ask and see what hits come up from the search. It would make more sense to teach students to start with a search of the civil war, read and reflect on the information and then move on.
ReplyDeleteThe information you provided on your internet research is great. It will be incredibly useful for me. I agree that there are many useful websites on the internet with tons of educational information. I just wish there was an easy way to filter it all. Sometimes it just seems like there is so much that I could never get through it all, but what if I only covered a little bit and ended up missing out on something that would change everything for me.
ReplyDeleteI also thought that twitter was kind of silly and perhaps was named that because it was for twits ;-). If you passed a big test then sure your friends would like to hear about, but the minutia of your day is just ridiculous. However, you're right about subscribing to pages that can keep you up to date about new technology and research. If they're going through this material and sending out the best or at least summaries to give you an idea of whether it would be useful to you then it would save a lot of time. Also, twitter can be useful in that it makes you limit yourself to what is important. I have read textbooks and other books on various topics and have thought you could have said in a paragraph what you took 20 pages to tell me. Twitter's limitation on characters means getting to the heart of what you want to say without all the superfluous words in between.
As a new Twitter user myself, I thought it was all about people, who had nothing better to do, then post about what they had for breakfast or where they were shopping that day.
ReplyDeleteBut then, I got a job as an elementary school media specialist and the other media specialists showed me how useful it can be. I follow a group of media specialists and they post wonderful things such as great books reviews, lessons on starting discussion groups about different books, online resources that have been particularly helpful and many, many websites that offer all different kinds of information that I can pass on to my students. I follow a few of the other media specialists blogs and I get their posts plus posts of people they follow (if they retweet it to their blog), so its like having a built in filter of sorts. The information has to pass through two other people before I see it, so the post must be useful.
Thanks.
Stacy A