Dodge Article

One of the concepts in the Dodge article is finding great sites. The article talks about mastering search engines and how beneficial it is to be able to quickly and properly navigate the different search engines. It talks about probing the "deep web" and looking through less obvious sites to find information about the topic you're researching. Lastly, Dodge talks about not losing the links and information you've found. He uses Backflip as a web-based bookmark service that teachers can use to keep their sites.

Andy and I found some really great sites about pirates. Some of the sites had a lot of information about the various aspects of piracy that we were using in our webquest, and the information was laid out in a very user friendly way. We used Google docs as a way to keep the information and links all together so that we'd both have easy access to them. The web-based bookmark sites are fantastic for one person to use, but when you're doing a collaborative project like this one, it's difficult to keep track of the same links and pages. Google docs, for us, solved this problem. Depending on how the links and sites actually end up working in the webquest will determine if we keep them for future uses. If they end up not actually working, then we will need to go in and find different sites that work better for the webquest.

Pirates Webquest

Here's the link to the webquest about Pirates that Andy and I made.


http://sites.google.com/site/aepirates/Home

Reiser--Teams Curriculum

The examples of the Integrated Final Projects are designed based on the concepts from the Reiser article using the TEAMS curriculum. Each of the different lesson plans has the break down of activities for each discipline unit/rotation, then there are the four types of activities within each rotation.

Team teaching is a concept that I really like. I think that it helps make the students see the interconnectedness of their learning, and makes some of the more “abstract” classes seem more real world applicable. I think that while it could take more work on the teachers side of things because they do have to get together more often to collaborate with the other teachers. But I do think that it can help direct a teacher in terms of what they teach. Teachers do have to be more willing to collaborate with the other teachers to make this function, and if one teacher isn’t doing their share then the system breaks because they are all reliant on one and another. With the particular TEAMS curriculum, I would like to see it implemented to see how the four activities actually end up playing out, and how they work. It depends on the teachers if this ends up being worthwhile. I think that it has a lot of potential to be a huge success, but I think it’s also got a lot that can go wrong. The teachers need to be excited about using this and need to put in the extra energy to make this work the way that it should, or else it can completely fall flat. They also need to help keep their kids motivated about working with this, or it would end up being a huge waste of time for both the students and the teacher.