I was very excited to get to dive into this assignment being that in an earlier technology course I took for undergrad I was asked to do the same as a test to see if we could pick out appropriate educational material for educational use, and I was very distraught in what I found. There is a huge demand for more technology in the classroom, and not a ton of guidance on how to create the technology safely for your students eyes, whether it be inappropriate material or plain inaccurate and false information. The websites provided in the textbook were very exciting to me to finally have a base of actual websites that give me something incredible to work with as a teacher. These websites are very practical and easy to use, as well as convenient and workable for the students in my class.
Kid Friendly
I loved how Ask for Kids was such a "kid-friendly" site for research. So many children know how to use a computer these days, but not many kids know how to research a topic and find the information they truly need. They can just easily ask a question just as they can in class and get the response they are looking for.
I also found websites that gave learning tools, educational games, and literature that are easy to locate and maneuver through for children and teens. It is so important for kids to have access to age appropriate information!
Teacher Friendly
I was extremely thrilled to see some of these websites provided printables and lessons as well as resources and guides to fun and interactive ideas for teachers to incorporate in the classroom. It is always great to come up with your own ideas for your class, but at the same time, it is great that we can communicate with other teachers and share ideas and experiences that worked and didn't work. I love that technology is leading us to a larger "classroom" of ideas!
As I searched through the Department of Education, I found many links and helpful information for parents regarding schools and statistics as well as policies and rules. Of course these facts are important, but I was displeased finding that they did not offer many links for children and parents to further the education and technology at home. I do believe that many teachers now are creating their own class website providing links and such to these types of websites and such for parents and students to access.
This assignment definitely opened my eyes to the importance in not only my own importance to careful research and keeping up with appropriate websites and information that is useful and correct, but also making sure my students know how and are capable of finding educational material on the web.
Maggie,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your comment about how there is a huge demand for more technology in the classroom, and not a ton of guidance on how to create the technology safely for your students eyes. This statement is completely true. There are many educators who are hesitant to integrate technology into their classroom because they don't know how to use they it or they don't know how to exactly integrate it properly. If teachers had guidance and training on this new technology I feel that they would become more comfortable using it.
The Department of Education website provided many useful links, but I agree they didn't have any links for children and parents to further the education and technology at home. These links would be very useful because they would provide guidance to parents and show them how they can use technology with their children.
The thing I have found to be most difficult doing research at school, with the kids, is that a lot of good material is blocked. As we get further and further into this class, I keep thinking how great it would be to start a blog with my students. How neat would it be to have "kid writing" for the parents to see what we have been doing? It would be like a class newspaper. The kids could submit their writing and ideas to go on the blog, post 1-2 time s a week and share all of this with the parents. However, the current climate at schools, this would be difficult to complete on campus and to be honest, I don't want to do this if the kids can't see their own products. SO what is the solution? I guess I have to keep searching for that happy medium.
ReplyDeleteIf you look on your county's website they might have Kid friendly links for the kids to use at home or school. I know OCPS does and some individual schools do too. You can also try Kelly's Kindergaten. This oone is kid and teacher friendly.
Emilie Zayas