While at conferences I was able to check out the class website and be instantly updated with what everyone was doing in class. It was interesting to view the different links comparing the various search engines. I have become a creature of habit and have been personally, addicted to Google. This was not always the case for me, but I have found that Google is the best search engine to fit my needs. I have found that there are not many search engines geared towards high school students. For some students there is too much information to sift through to find valuable, reliable sources. Others don't have the maturity or knowhow to be exposed to all the information the web has access to. While it is our job to educate students, sometime it would just be nice to have a search engine that is pushing the students in the right direction. From talking to people in class, they were very excited to tell me about the ability to create your own search engine within Google. I feel that this would be a very usefully tool.
Another aspect that was looked at in class was word processing. This year I gave my Honors Algebra 2 students a writing assignment. Students were asked to write a position letter to me about how they feel the role of calculators should take in class. Students were asked to use a word processor to complete the assignment and were given a variety of options to turn this letter in; printed off copy, e-mail attachment, or a Google Document. There were a couple of students that did use the electronic word processor, and many that were impressed by the technology. In math class word processing is important for the creation of worksheets and notes which are nice and neat. Word processing can be difficult and time consuming to use in the mathematics world however, I use it very often when working with colleagues or on grad school projects.
I hope to learn many more technologies in this class and am excited to implement them into my every day teaching world.
2 comments:
Hey Emilia. I am also a big google user, but I found that askkids.com is pretty good as well. I thought it would be geared towards younger, but I found some sites that would actually work pretty well for HS age students. There is also a way to set the "age" on that site to younger adults which makes the search more geared toward our HS students. Just an idea!
I also am a Google person and it hard to go away from something that you are familiar with. An old friend, like Google, is not a bad thing, but make new friends. Kind of like the girl scount law :).
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