Literacy Websites

As part of the requirements for ED 638, here are five websites that will enhance literacy development. I hope that there are found to be helpful by both students and teacher.

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/magickey/index.html

http://www.ncwiseowl.org/

www.shelsilverstein.com

www.literacyleader.com

www.school.discoveryeducation.com

Classcentral/Rcampus

The last of the websites that I reviewed was classcentral.com. The fact that I used this website for a previous assignment made it a natural choice to be included in my blog. From my experience with classcentral, it would be great tool for teachers primarily. This site would allow teacher to set up on-line classrooms which would extend the academic experience beyond the boundaries of a classroom.

Teachers can develop whole lessons and post them on this site where students can then check it from home. Worksheets and test are easily developed through this site allow for many educational extensions. Websites such as classcentral provide the opportunity for make-up work to be accessed easily. If a student misses an extended period of time, he’ll be able to stay with the class and won’t get left behind. That only makes this site extremely useful.

Diigo

The next internet tool I’d like to focus on is diigo.com. Diigo is a multifaceted website that can enhance learning as well as help with teacher’s organization. When preparing for either a lesson or a presentation, both teachers and students find the need to bookmark a web page. Bookmarked webpages allow for easy access back to those same webpages. Diigo not only help bookmark pages but also allows someone to highlight a certain part of the webpage. If you were to bookmark a page, sure I’d be easy to go back to that page thanks to the bookmark but you’d still have to hunt down the relevant part of the webpage. With diigo’s highlighting feature, the parts of a web page that are of interest to you will be easier to find. Students can be encouraged to use this feature while doing research on the internet. Diigo also lets you access those bookmarks and highlight from any computer.

Diigo also gives users the option to share the work done on the website. This feature allows teachers to form on-line learning groups. As a result, group work can take place without the students having to leave their homes. It can also let students share their work immediately with each other helping to build a strong collaborative academic environment.

The collaborative aspect of diigo can be taken a step further because the sharing isn’t just limited to students work and research done on-line by allowing students to see each other annotations without having ot download any software.

Teachertube

The first of the three tools that I choose to review for my technology blog was teacher tube. Teacher tube is a website model after the popular video sharing website youtube. Teachtube layout and navigation is much like that of youtube’s. The site has a search box where the user may type in anything academic interest, press enter and the site will retrieve numerous videos dealing with that topic.

The site does offer more then just videos. On the top of the web page, the user will find several other options that include blogs, photos, documents and channel. The channel option is a why of narrowing your searches by grade level or age. These “channels” range from an elementary school one to a university one.

The usefulness of a site is teachertube is boundless. Educators can have access to relevant technological sources for just about any subject by just visiting teachertube. If a teacher needs an informative video of the Cold War, teachertube is an excellent place to start. One of the many advantages to this site is that it cuts out the non relevant videos. If you were to type “Cold War” in youtube’s search engine, you’d get clips about cold cuts and you’d have to spend time sifting through a lot of videos, most of which wouldn’t be helpful. With teachertube, you can be confident that the videos with be on topic.

The Classroom and The Internet

Welcome to my technology blog. This is a requirement for completion of ED 638, Teaching with the Internet. This blog will explore three websites that, both teacher of any grade level and students of any age. will find effective in enhancing their respective academic experience.