Make your own free newsletter

Newbery Webquest

I chose the Newbery Webquest as a potential tool for my classroom because it covers material that would be useful for language and reading development. After completing the task the students should have learned more about the Newbery award, looking at books from a critical point of view, and given them a better perspective on the book as a whole. This could be used in a classroom in order to help students to understand the importance of quality literature and reading for pleasure.

Website Evaluating Checklists for Students

I chose the Evaluation Wizard as a tool for students to use to evaluate websites on their own. I thought this tool would be especially useful for students because it breaks down the evaluation process into author, publisher, objectivity, links from, date, accuracy, evidence, and links to. The site allows students to enter in the webpage's URL and then chose the focus of their evaluation, such as author. Once they have chosen a focus the evaluation tool tells the students in understandable language specific things to look for, such as how much experience does the author have in this area, and provides a text box for the student to type evaluation notes for that focus. An extra bonus to this site is it offers a tutorial to use if you are having trouble finding the information you are looking to evaluate, such as authors name. Overall this seems like a very useful tool for students to learn how to evaluate websites.

Website Evaluation

The website I evaluated, Science with me,  was a free educational website for elementary age children. The website offers science movies, songs, coloring sheets, worksheets, articles, blogger “Science with Mom!” projects and stories to help children learn scientific principles and science the fun way.  They consider themselves as an interactive online science community for kids, teachers, parents, and home-schoolers. Not only is this website full of useful science lessons, it is appealing to children within the K12 range, the information is interesting for children and is presented in an engaging way, and parents are encouraged to become involved with their children on the website by being their science experiment assistant. Teachers could allow children to browse the website during school and chose a focus they want to research. The teachers could then assign them the experiment related to that  study focus for them to conduct at home with their parents and then report back to the class with the results. I would highly recommend this website!

I enjoyed the website evaluation experience because it taught me what to look for when deciding whether websites are trustworthy before introducing them to your classroom. Evaluating websites before introducing them or advising students to look into them is very important in order to keep one's reliability secure as a teacher.

What can Wiki's do for me?

Before our class on wiki's, Wikipedia was the only wiki I knew of. My knowledge on Wikipedia consisted only of knowing that anyone can edit the wiki, therefore the information you find on Wikipedia isn't necessarily reliable. After our class I had learned that wiki's can be very useful in informal situations and within classrooms. I found it creative to use wiki's as a resource for planning a trip or a class project. I had a class presentation in a different course last week and offered the idea of my group using a wiki to collect our ideas in forming our presentation. I think there is still much for me to learn about wikis and believe the best way for me to do so will be through practice and exploration with them.