Universal Design for Learning Guidelines

I am assuming this graph goes with the Universal Design of Web Pages in Class Projects article. However, without further information I am not sure how someone would go about using these guidelines to create a universally accessible website.

Universal Design of Web Pages in Class Projects

Universal Design means addressing and thinking about the needs of the widest possible audience when creating a website. We all know the internet has been connecting people around the world and has the potential to make information accessible to everyone. But the reality is some websites are not accessible to people with disabilities. This article is about how make a website that is accessible to everyone.

I found this article very interesting because I am sure I will encounter many different students with varying disabilities in the future, thus I feel it is important to learn how to provide appropriate techniques for various situations. The article includes disabilities a teacher may encounter, however the answers for working with these disabilities/circumstances seem complicated and look as though they require a lot of additional training. This led me to wonder if schools have trained specialists who know what to do for students with various disabilities.

The Student WebQuest

The article is about how teachers can use WebQuests to enhance learning experiences in their classrooms. Not only do WebQuests save valuable class time by focusing students on a task, but they also allow students to go deeper into a topic. The author explains, “A well-written quest demands that students go beyond fact finding: It asks them to analyze a variety of resources and use their creativity and critical-thinking skills to derive solutions to a problem. The problem is often ‘real world’--that is, one that needs a genuine and reasonable solution.”

One thing I like about WebQuests is students will be working on the computer and I can easily look and see if they are on task. Thus I won’t have to worry so much about my students being on appropriate sites, or if they are messing around surfing the web. It is important for students to know how to search the internet for good information, but I don’t need all of my assignments to be about finding reliable websites. Therefore another thing I like about WebQuest is all of the websites needed for quest are already on the site and students can just do the work. In general, I think using WebQuests in the classroom will be exciting not just for the students, but for me too.

WebQuest Focus

The article explains that WebQuest is a great tool when created and used properly in the classroom. There are five guiding principles to creating a good WebQuest: Find great sites, Orchestrate your learners and resources, Challenge your learners to think, Use the medium, Scaffold high expectations (FOCUS).

I really enjoyed reading the WebQuest focus article, and believe it will be very useful when trying to create my own WebQuest. My favorite section of the article is Use the medium because it contains some great suggestions for how to use the internet. If my students are learning about ocean life, I like the idea of putting live footage of sea otters, or dolphins some kind of aquarium/zoo cam on the page. Another idea I liked was using conversation; allowing students to post their comments and findings, or opening the WebQuest up to other classrooms and having even larger discussions. An additional thing I took away from this article is, it is important to have the students do something with the information instead of just paraphrase the information. I want my students to go beyond just retelling the information. I want them to be creative, use their problem solving skills, and have an opinion about things they read on the internet.

Family Guide to Child Safety on the Internet

Child Safety on the Internet is an informative article about how parents can assist their children with being safe online. Within the article are expert advice and tips about how to protect children and encourage safe online practices. It also has information about what steps to take if something bad happens while your child is using the internet; who to contact, what to do etc. The main focus of this article is to promote internet safety.

This would be a great article to share with my students’ parents. I like that this article explains to parents that today’s students NEED to use the internet, and that there are safe ways for their children to use the internet. I think the online parenting tips are great, and I also really like how they set up an online safety contract. Hopefully my future school district has something like this set up for the parents, if not I will definitely ask for permission to add this article to my classroom website.

Teaching Zach to Think

This article is about a boy who does some research online about the Holocaust. He comes across a professor’s website from Northwestern University that claims the Holocaust never happened. The 14 year old boy assumed the information must be valid because a professor wrote it. The article places an importance on teaching students how to validate information found on the internet.

Wow, what an interesting article! I agree it is important to teach our students how to find good information. The article states,” the most vital skills will involve applying knowledge to produce information and facilitate communication. And one of the most important skills will involve evaluating the resources you decide to use. As much time as we spend teaching kids how to find things on the Net, we need to expend 10 times more effort teaching them how to interpret what they’ve found.” I also like the part of the article where the author points out how to tell if a website is someone’s personal site, and I think this would be something valuable to teach my students.

Developing Ethical Direction

Developing Ethical Direction was about how to teach students what is right and wrong when it comes to using technology. Many students cut and paste things from the internet and use it in their papers because they think it is an ok thing to do. This article uses a compass metaphor to teach about proper use of technology and misuse.

I liked this article because if teachers use these kinds of activities in their classrooms then our students will be much more informed about how to behave when using technology. I can remember one of my teachers explaining that copying and pasting from the internet is wrong because someone else took a lot of time writing that. She taught our class to take notes on what see read on the computer screen, and then come up with our own sentences. The digital compass activity would be great to use in the classroom because it covers so many different kinds of technology use; messaging, plagiarism, hacking into the teacher’s computer, texting during class, etc. While some of the subject such as hacking onto the teacher’s computer may seem extreme it would still be a good exercise for the students. And you never know, maybe one of your students actually knows how to hack computers!

Tools of the mind

Tools of the mind was my least favorite of the three articles. The first thing that bothered me about this article is it uses data from 1999-2003; that was a very long time ago and it is really hard for me to believe that those facts are still true. The author states, “the most commonly used applications are what I call show-and-tell applications- PowerPoint, Word, Publisher, and Front Page-with the Internet the most commonly used non-show-and-tell kind of application in terms of frequency of classroom use. Classrooms rarely use spreadsheets or databases, which are conceptually and technically more difficult.” I believe more recent data would show that databases are a big part of middle and high school, I know from personal experience they are used to find research, scholarly journal articles, etc to write research papers and complete projects. The other thing I don’t agree with is that technology should be almost invisible. Yes technology should support the core areas of teaching but why does it have to be invisible? Technology is not invisible to today’s student it is very much a part of who they are as learner.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

I really enjoyed the Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants article, and I agree with the author 100%; teachers need to update their methods. I see myself more as a Digital Native than an Immigrant because I grew up with computers, internet, and video games. I think it is really important that teachers start finding ways to teach the traditional subjects in a way that their Digital Native students will understand. “So we have to invent, but not necessarily from scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully. My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. After all, it’s an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.” I agree with the author that games are a great way to learn and practice skills, but there are also great websites that provide students with wonderful visuals. Scholastic is one of my favorite websites for teaching because it allows your students interact with their learning. For example there is a unit on the Scholastic site called The First Thanksgiving that shows students what it was like to be on the Mayflower coming to America and then how life was when they arrived. With all of the great resources the internet provides us with, today’s’ teachers really have no excuse not to teach in a Digital Native friendly way.

Digital Kids. Analog Schools.

Digital Kids. Analog Schools was a fun, quick article to read. In the article there were a lot of quotes, but quote two really stood out to me. “I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.” Like this author, I am also tired people debating whether or not students should or shouldn’t have computers in class. Today’s student grew up with technology swirling around them, so of course it is part of their lives. Why wouldn’t we use something that is so much a part of our student to propel them further in education? If we as teachers find a way to harness technology and teach the less popular subjects in more exciting ways, I think we should.