Reflection # 2

I thought the information on the the November Learning website was very useful. I bookmarked several of the mentioned sites for future use. For the MAPping project I chose the Victorian Robots website because it sounded interesting.The URL didn't seem to have any red flags but the pictures seemed so unrealistic. After using the link command my suspicions were confirmed when I discovered links to the author's personal website, personal blogs, and most importantly a brief description of my site that included the words "fictional" and "hoax". Although it wasn't too tough to see that this site was not credible, there are many other sites that I would be unsure of. The only method I felt comfortable using to check credibility was looking at the URL and website content. Now I have more reliable ways to check out a questionable site. This project has also made me question the reliability of sources that I have used for writing papers throughout my college career. My curiosity has me thinking about finding copies of my old papers and checking the sites that I used using this new criteria!

After exploring Delicious I do see some advantages to using it. I can view my bookmarks from my home or school computer. It would be a great way to share new sites with my fellow pre-K teachers and when I am a librarian I can hopefully get the teachers involved in this site so that I can share helpful sites with them.

After learning about the uses for wikis and seeing different styles of wikis I have the idea to create one so that other pre-k teachers involved with a grant that I am a part of can communicate. My plan is to make different subject related sections related to our trainings, such as Letter Knowledge, Phonological Awareness, Math, etc. Teachers can post ideas that they have had and different strategies that they have learned to teach these areas. They could also post helpful links or videos to better explain something they have done. I can see advantages to using wikis in the classroom. It gives students a new and comfortable forum to find assignments and share ideas. It might be a disadvantage though that you can go in and edit another persons ideas and add to them. Some students could abuse this feature.



I loved how the November Learning site had examples of activities you could do with students to teach them how to use the analysis tools. This would also be a great activity for teachers to complete during a staff development. If they are aware of these tools then they could teach it to students. I may have been able to see that the Victorian Robot site was a fake but a young student might not be able to see that. When students access information at home we cannot watch over their shoulder to make sure they are using credible sources, so we must equip them with the knowledge and tools to do this themselves. I also think that students should have access to educational databases through the library so that they can have the opportunity to find information on a site that is known for it's credibility.

This week I have definitely learned more about web 2.0 tools and a few that I would like to explore further are educational podcasts and Flickr.