What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons allows other people to use and benefit from your work. Getting a creative Commons license is free and takes a simple visit to their website creativecommons.org. Creative Commons modifies copyright terms to best suit individual needs; telling your viewers exactly what they can and cannot do with your work.

As a student, I benefit from seeing other educator’s work. I would like to see more teacher’s ideas, previous lessons, bulletin board examples etc. that I could possibly use and build from. We could all benefit and learn from one another, so as long as people give credit where credit is due, I think they should be able to use their ideas for educational purposes.

Design Your Web Site from the Bottom Up

This article gives website creators 10 easy to follow steps for building a website. Step one is brainstorm a list of everything you want to put on your website. Step two tells you to take that list and group the items into categories. Step three suggests you should critique the categories you came up with in order to determine they make sense. Step four is revise your categories if needed. Step five recommends you develop a flow chart to help you organize the layout of your website and keep track of your pages. Similar to step five, step six proposes you develop a navigation plan that your audience will use to move around your site. Step seven is page layout. Step eight suggests you keep your website simple. Step nine; make your homepage which will be the introduction to your website. Step ten says you’re done, congratulate yourself.

To be honest, I think this article is pretty common knowledge. While the steps are easy to follow, they are really obvious suggestions like keep your site simple, organize it in a viewer friendly manner, and create your home/introduction page last. Obviously you would create your intro page last because you don’t know what will be on your site until you have given it some thought. I think anyone who was taught to write the introduction of an essay last would know to create their home/intro page of their website last. Steps five-seven are really repetitive and probably could have been condensed into one step. The only part of this article I actually liked was the part about grouping. I think that having things separated into news, class info, and for parents categories would be really helpful for my site viewers.

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.