blog six

The concept of a Web 2.0 confuses me a little but I think that using it in the education of K-12 students can be very useful to some teachers. The concepts of blogs, wikis and mashups are a big part of this new web. Teachers can use blogs to help all of the students in the class and other class to communicate with each other about school related materials. Wikis let people team up and build websites together and control them together. This can help teachers who are together on a “team” communicating with the students all together. Mashups are a way to look up information from different websites all on one. This can help students look up information for reports and papers. I would use it because it is all very helpful.

I believe that Wikipedia is not a good source to use in school or doing school work. Even though anyone can use or change the information on Wikipedia which makes It inaccurate, the majority of the information is correct. Or at least the general idea of the topic is. If someone wants to look up something real quick just for general knowledge then Wikipedia is okay, but if someone were to use it for school, as a teacher I would not take it as an acceptable source.

The past week the most important skill I have learned is how to check if information on a website is accurate or not. This will be extremely useful in my educational career because when writing papers that require a website as a source I will know how to look if it is acceptable and my teacher will allow it as a source.

post five

I believe using the Internet for research is very useful. There is so much information on the Internet. Even though there is a large amount of its is not useful because it does not come from a creditable source there is also a large amount that is legit and can be very useful to students. Websites like wikipedia or other websites that any person with Internet access can change the information are not good to use. Websites that you find at places like google scholar or any website that ends in .edu are very helpful and you can trust that information.

Other ways that you can use web-based resources to support student learning is online encylopedias. A few resources that I have used are encarta encyclopedia or websites that you can pay to see the information.

Being a middle school teacher a conern that I would have when supervising stuendts in a technology environment is that they would be on personal profiles sites such as myspace and facebook. These sites can be very dangerous when students talk to people that they do not know. Even if students think they could possibly know the person they are talking to, they might not. There are a lot of adults out there who find plesure in taking to children and wanting to meet up with them which can lead to the child being abducted, raped, or murderd.