Activity Reflection #1
My first activity reflection assignment was to search for online resources that contained educationally relevant materials. I found out there is a lot of information out there on the internet. The process of narrowing the search to find correct and appropriate information can take a little more time than expected.
I have always used Google anytime that I’m looking for a topic on the web. Google seems able to find anything I’m looking for with very little effort on my part. I never stopped to think if the information was correct. I decided to try Google for Educators. This site contains tools for your classroom, activities, and even classroom posters. One thing I found on this site a Google for Educations discussion group where you can post questions to other educators around the world.
While using Google, modifying the parameters provided for search criteria can reduce the amount of information you receive. Using the special characters that are on page 131 in our textbook, Integrating Technology and Digital Media in the Classroom (Gunter 2010) when using Yahoo can help limit your search, and I found this to be extremely useful.
I began my search for educationally relevant materials in math, the field in which I teach. I started on a quest for “math work sheets”, something every math teacher would have in their classroom. I would have expected this search to yield a high number of hits, but I never expected this many. The first search provided over 2,290,000 results. It quickly became apparent that I needed to narrow the search criteria a tad. So, I searched using “algebra + worksheets + free +printable - algebra 2”, and the results were a little more reasonable. I received 465,000 results. That is 1,825,000 less sites!
To help me qualify the results of my search, I asked myself some basic questions. If I was teaching, how would I integrate technology into my classroom today? What would I have available to me that I didn’t have 12 years ago when I taught? When I was first teaching; the technology that we used was an overhead projector. Today there is an abundance of integrating technology into all subjects on the web. These are some of the results that I found.
One of the first things I would set up for my classroom would be a class-dedicated web page. This page would include all class work and homework assignments, projects, and all information about the class. I found this free site that allows you to set up your own web page http://www.thehomeworkzone.com/index.php?keywords=websites-for-teachers
I was able to find from the results another site to help integrate technology into your everyday classroom. http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech146.shtml . This site provides 20 different ideas to incorporate technology; some of the ideas are online SAT practice, online math problems, online logic games, provide a URL of the day, and a link to a joke of the week.
Yet another fantastic site was http://www.teachnology.com. This site provides teacher resources, lesson plans, and worksheets for the four academic classes. I would take advantage of these materials to help supplement my lesson plans, projects and work from my current text book.
I also visited the Florida Department of Education website and found that it has many links for students, parents, educators, and even administrators. There was a lot of information about the rules, policies, and standards for each subject. However, I didn’t see much information for the classroom teacher, and it didn’t yield any valuable resources for me to include into my classroom.
After visiting FDOE, I wanted to dive deeper into my local education resources. So, I went to the site for the specific county that I live in; for me it was Seminole county. I found the county site had links to several items from Class Size, Employment, Dividends, Certification, all the way down to Where Do I Catch My Bus?
Finally, I needed a way to keep all the great web sites I found together in one convenient location so I could return to them later. So, I set up a Diigo account and bookmarked the above mentioned sites for future use in my classes.
So in conclusion, depending on what type of educational relevant material you are looking for, there are an over abundance of sites ready and willing to provide that information to you. Using simple techniques like asking basic directed questions about the content, choosing a good search engine, and providing additional search options can help in narrowing your search to appropriate sites to use in your classroom.
Here are the websites that I used:
http://www.google.com/educators/index.html
http://www.thehomeworkzone.com/index.php?keywords=websites-for-teachers
http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech146.shtml
Gunter, Glenda. (2010) Integrating Technology and Digital Media in the Classroom. (6th Ed.)Boston MA.
In addition to "make a classroom web page" sites like the one you've linked to, many classroom teachers find it useful to use blog software as the basis for their easy-to-create/modify web sites. Just a thought. :-)
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