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.
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I like your plan about maintaining those links and being aware of how effective those links may or may not be. I think it's important to make sure links we use are easy to access and are navigable for the students who will be using them. It's one thing to find a site that matches your topic, but it is another to find a site that is relevant enough for the students to find it interesting and helpful.
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely important to find great sites that would be educationally beneficial for students. I think that when good websites are used, it also shows students how they can navigate the web to find good, quality, and relevant sources. Also, using google docs as a way to keep track of your links is a great idea. I really like how well google docs works in collaborative projects. Why didn't I know about this earlier?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was putting everything together and trying to make sure every link we had was relevant, I found myself double checking all the sites we had linked on our webquest. Everything was good, it all made sense and was very applicable to what we wanted the students to learn. I then found myself looking up more sites to see if there was something that I missed--needless to say, there's a lot of junk out there. Of course, you already know this, but the students don't necessarily know this. As teachers, we already have a solid background of whatever our content area is, and so it's easy to weed out the bad sites because it just makes sense to us. That's not necessarily the case for our students. There's a reason they're in school. What's great about the webquest is that it helps them weed out the bad sites by not giving them the option to look at them, we can direct them to quality content. Of course, that means we have to be on top of things ourselves.
ReplyDeleteAdding links to the WebQuest was actually really difficult for what Kate and I were trying to accomplish with our WebQuest, like Nate said, there is a lot of junk out there, and keeping it narrowed and focused is definately a must within any classroom... can't afford to have kids losing focus or getting distracted by unnecessary links.
ReplyDeleteBut, I must say I really loved (however breif the presentation was) the Pirate idea for yours and Andy's project.