Chapter 6 Teaching with Educational Websites and Other Online Reasources

*All links are highlighted in yellow*

Focus Questions:  How are information management technologies such a bookmarking, social bookmarking, and information alerts useful to teachers?

• Bookmarking, social bookmarking, and information alert technologies enables teachers and their students to manage information electronically. 
• Bookmarking refers to saving website addresses on your computer to access them easily, rather than looking them up repeatedly. 
• Social bookmarking happens when groups of interested people share their Web links electronically in a public Web space. Online tolls such as Delicious, Backflip, and Connotea are useful social bookmarking tools for teachers. Bookmarking services such as Portaportal and Filamentality allow teachers to bookmark a group of sites in a secure space for use by students. 
• Information alerts are electronic notices that receive on their personal computers advertising them that material on requested topics has become available in an online format. 

Photo Credit to Ricardo Barra from Flickr

One thing that always gets me frustrated is when I love a website that I saw, and I forget what the website was called. It is difficult trying to remember every valuable website that I have visited; I know anyone can relate to that. Good thing that as technology progresses we are capable of remembering all the websites that we love with social bookmarking. Social bookmarking expands the concept of individual bookmarking from one user/ one computer to a community of users on many computers (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative  2005b, May) (Maloy, 2010, p. 146). Bookmarking websites on one’s own Internet window was the only way to save them at one point. As technology progresses websites are being created to help store all types of bookmarks that people love. People are not restricted anymore to using the same computer all the time to access their bookmarks, but can be anywhere in the world accessing their bookmarks with Internet access. It is an essential for teachers to create a profile on Delicious, Backflip, Connotea, Goodreads, or Diigo to save their bookmarks because they can reference back to them whenever they please. Teachers could easily create lesson plans anywhere they are by having a profile on one of these social bookmarking websites to easily access their favorite websites. 

Tech Tools Link 6.2: Delicious

At first I have trouble locating this website because the textbook says it is www.del.icio.us.com, when it is really delicious.com. There is no need for the additional periods separating the words. Delicious is a website where anyone, even teachers, can create an account to save their favorite websites. It is free to create an account on delicious and can be accessed from anyplace that has Internet connection. This website lets a person add, organize, and send any bookmark that they place on the website. Delicious even has a toolbar that can be downloaded to make it more accessible to add bookmarks to delicious.  This makes it easier than having to go to the delicious website every time someone wants to add a bookmark. It is always easier to save bookmarks onto a website because if a bookmark is saved straight to a computer it can only be accessed through that computer. Saving bookmarks to a website gives people a wide range of places they can go, and always having access to their favorite sites to use. I enjoy always having access to my favorite websites, so I would recommend anyone to try it out. 

Summary & Connection:

Who would have ever known so much stuff can be done with the Internet that can benefit teachers. As a future teacher I am always learning something new each week from the textbook, and I know I will always refer back to it after this class is done. This week I have learned that there are many different sites that can be used to save bookmarks onto. It is important to save informational resources on these websites because they can always be retrieved. Teachers can make their lesson plans from anywhere, so it is always important to have access to them at all times. A piece of information that I found valuable to use while making a lesson plan is using education websites to have more interaction with the students. Not only does using the Internet involve incorporating technology to a classroom, it helps students get more practice with the subject they are learning. A term that I have learned that goes along with teachers using the Internet as teaching tool is called digital content. Digital content means to easily accessible source of academic information and new knowledge, the Internet is unparalleled (Maloy, 2010, p.145). Teachers can use this Web-based information to teach the school curriculum (Maloy, 2010, p.145). The internet is evolving from just being a source to surf the web, to being a source of teaching information in the classroom. 

This week I did a video on Webquest because I wanted to learn about them, but it was the one page that was ripped out of my book. So I did my own research on WebQuest and Virtual Field Trips. 

(First two are videos on Web Quest)

(Virtual Field Trip/ Technology)

Resources: 

Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2010).Transforming learning with new technologies. Allyn & Bacon.