EduHound and emTech offer a large range of sites that would be appealing to teachers because of the large number of topics. The topics that I would pass on to my teachers include Geography and Language Arts. The Geography sites include National Geographic Map Machine and USGS: Our Changing Planet. Both of these sites would offer excellent teaching tools for educators including interactive maps. The Language Arts site that excites me is the Blue Book of Grammar & Punctuation. I think students are not taught enough about these skills and this site is a resource that would be very useful.
Our state Department of Education site offers a lot of information that is complied in one place. As a Media Specialist, I rely on the DOE site to find the state standards for library skills, professional development information and what books students voted for in the Sunshine State Young Readers’ Awards. All of this information allows me to do my job efficiently and I can find what I need in one place.
I wish I had more time to just randomly “surf the web” to find great resources. Since this is not possible, using my search terms and keyword to find other sites that have compiled the information I need save me time yet allows me to find great educational site.
Stacy Anderson
Stacy, it is so true that as teachers the one thing we usually lack is time. For that reason it is definately important that we know which sites are the most user-friendly and easy to navigate, and include the best resources. This will make life a lot easier for us. During this activity I bookmarked a lot of these sites for future use. My two favorite sites were the student-directed Ask for Kids, and the teacher-friendly Education-world.com.
ReplyDeleteI also found our state site to be very useful. The layout was easy to navigate, and I found a lot of useful links to both information and resources. I especially liked how there were links and resources as well as information available not only to teachers, but to students and parents (isn't it great that we can direct parents to this site to answer questions like "what is for lunch this week" or "what days are student holidays"?) I enjoyed the section professional development and inservice links where teachers can look up upcoming inservice dates and register for them online!
Megan Smith
Lack of time to surf the web for resources is most folks' response, including myself. Digital natives, however may not see surfing the web for resources as such a daunting and time consuming task. After all, they grew up with technology at their fingertips everywhere and all the time.
ReplyDeleteDigital natives also collaboration and communicate information on a daily basis instinctively through such tools as Facebook and texting.
It is amazing to me to realize how easy using and understanding new technological tools comes to digital natives as if it were second nature.
~Chrystal
Stacey, I couldn’t agree with you more that it takes time to search the Web, and we as educators and students ourselves often have difficulty finding any extra time in our days. You bring up a good point that anything to save time, such as finding websites that compile lists for you is a great idea. It is beneficial to ourselves because we are not wasting time, and it is beneficial to our students because they can benefit from our good teaching using the information found. I often rely too heavily on Google to find everything, which works, but can take a long time. Sites like the ones you mentioned can really help with that.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of the National Geographic Map Machine before. I checked it out and think it will be great to use in the classroom. It is much more up to date than Google Maps because when I check my own house on Google, it still does not show our fence and pool that have been there for 2 years now! This site did. It also has a lot more interactive features like you mentioned. Thank you for recommending it.
- Christie