WebQuests

I remember in elementary school going on a webquest with my class. I thought it was a lot of fun, but did not learn a whole lot from it. After going over webquests in our class, I saw the value of a good webquest. I realize that you can not decide on the merit of a webquests by just looking at one quest. It all comes down to a well wrought quest. It is necessary to have a quest that involves group work, researching, critical thinking, collaborating, and enhances the learning process. I think I would like to utilize web quests in my classroom, but only after I have researched the best kinds.

Wikis

Until this class I had never even heard of wikis before; however I am finding them to be very helpful and efficient. In another class I have a project and it has been very difficult to all get together. We discussed possibly using a wiki to help us collaborate on our different ideas. I think that wikis allow for people to work together efficiently and because it is also so user friendly it makes for a quick and easy way to work together.
I also think as far as Educational uses go, it could be very helpful. Specifically, I think it would work well with studyguides. When I teach I could assign groups a different chapter in a unit and then allow them all to work on their chapters using wiki. At the end they could all view the study guide for the unit and add and correct where needed.

Web 2.0 Tools

Our project on Web 2.0 tools was very informative. My partner and I had wordle, which makes creative word clouds.www.wordle.net
Here is an example where I allowed worldle to pull words from my blog and create a word cloud out of it:

 

While, I really enjoyed using wordle and plan on using it more when I teach, there were other Web 2.0 tools that I found even more helpful. I think my favorite tool was prezi. Prezi is a tool that allows you to make something similar to a powerpoint except that it is much more interactive and zooms in.

http://prezi.com/

I think prezi could be very helpful for presenting new information in a different fashion. I also think it would be a good tool for students to use themselves. Prezi has some that already done and are available for students to use. Here is a screenshot of one:

 

 

From here you can click on the different games  and zoom in. It is almost like playing an educational board game online! I think this a very innovative, interactive, and creative new tool! 

Great Teaching Resource

http://www.readwritethink.org/
For our "Evaluating Websites for Reliability and Usability" I picked Read Write Think and found it incredibly helpful and easy to use. It is a resource for mainly teachers but also caters to both students and parents. It offers sample lesson plans with supplement material and worksheets, along with printable graphic designers to enhance the note taking process, and it also provides creative ways to present different subjects to children. I will definitely use this website when I teach and see how it will be helpful in any grade I could teach.

After evaluating this website I was even more impressed with it. I discovered that its' information was both cited and reputable along with being grammatically correct. Read Write Think is also very easy to navigate and has graphics that enhance its' material. As a whole, I was very satisfied with the website and felt that it was trustworthy and user friendly. Also, this project taught me a great deal about website evaluation and made realize the importance of it. After researching if the website was reliable or not it made me think about important it is for it to be reliable if i was going to use it to teach. This project also taught me how to guide my own students through this process one day. It think this project is very applicable to everyday life, because as a student I am looking at website on a daily basis and need to decide if they are credited websites.

Website Evaluation Tool

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/index.html

This website is a helpful tool for understanding how to decide if a website is reputable. The site provides a tutorial on how to judge a website accurately. Not only does this website teach how to evaluate other sites but it explains the importance of evaluating websites and what can happen if you do not. There is also a section of the tutorial that explains how website can be good, bad, and ugly. Here it covers academic uses,personal, and hoaxes. After this explanation the website provides a helpful quiz to help you test your understanding. Altogether this website is a good asset to learning about the internet and is set up as though you are an internet detective making it a more interesting way to learn about the internet.