WebQuest

I really like the look of the Big Wide World Webquest and could see myself using it in a classroom. It is a critical thinking activity which has students act in groups and assess a variety of topics (people, plants, animals, culture, language) and asks open-ended questions for them to discover the answers to. The end goal for each subject is to come up with three rules for something about each topic ("how do people become heroes?", "how do animals adapt?") This is a great task for collaboration and for encouraging higher-order thinking.

Website evaluation

Doing the website evaluation was a valuable activity--it addressed a number of criteria for judging a site's credibility and use as educational tool. Some things I knew to keep in mind, like to look at who is publishing content and when it was last updated, but other things hadn't crossed my mind before--like what quality connection is necessary for this tool to be useful? Also, checking the presence of alt-tags on images never even struck me, but it makes so much sense. I think assessing the credibility of  a website is especially important for educators, whose credibility hinges on what tools they choose to use.

Class Dojo

One pretty cool thing I've been hearing about for schools is Class Dojo.

It's a tool to keep track of students' behavior. They are awarded points and can get real-time feedback, all at the touch of a button. Meanwhile, the software compiles data that an instructor or parent could look at for an individual or the whole class.
There are cute characters...



This is part of a larger trend of gamification, which "strive to leverage people's natural desires for competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, and closure." This is the same concept behind things like classroom economies, but applied to even more/smaller things. It means, basically, making problem-solving more like a game.

I would love to try this in my classroom.

Course Expectations

When I was a kid, they said that my generation was made up of "digital natives"-- that we grew up using computers, that interacting with technology was natural to us. When compared with the generations before us, this is true. But look at kids today!
I don't want to be like some of the teachers I had, that could never get a projector working, that could never play a movie...it was embarrassing. I want to be comfortable using the kinds of technology you find in the classroom (I have never even touched a smart board).
Also, I want to know how to use technology as a tool in the classroom, not just tacking things on. I want it to work for me, to make communication and teaching easier, not harder.
I'm comfortable using a computer and the technology that's become a part of everyday life, but I want to know more about how to use it in education.