When I consider valuable Internet resources for education it helps me to divide the various tools into:
Resources to help students learn and teachers teach.
o Online images, shared video and audio files.
o Interactive educational web sites – especially those connected to text books and other in-class resources, classroom blogs, shared documents, chat, online encyclopedia and dictionaries, etc.
Resources to show what students know or have learned.
o Electronic portfolios, Blogs, Wikis, student created web sites, youth media pieces, etc.
Resources that can help with preparation and evaluation.
o Professional blogs, social networks for educators including Nings, book-marking sites, online assessment sites, and professional web sites.
I find the amount of Internet resources for education to be nearly unlimited and the value nearly priceless. One almost has to find a niche using specific resources of interest or spend countless hours experimenting with different tools. The former would be the optimal experience but sometimes difficult. Being a working wife and mother and graduate student, my “experimental” time is limited.
Blogs are currently the most valuable resource for me because of the format of providing information or sharing ideas and then receiving feedback from other interested parties. Classroom or student blogs give teachers and students experience in using this format to address concepts covered as part of the curriculum and other topics of interest. Students have an electronic forum to share their knowledge and opinions and read and evaluate those of their peers. Through blogs students develop and display their reading, comprehension, analysis, evaluation, and writing skills just to name a few. Educators participate in and/or create their own blogs to share information, opinions, ideas, resources, and sometimes, just vent. I have noticed in discussion with other educators who use Internet resources that they too prefer or find the most value in one or two specific tools such as Wikis, web site development, Google docs, etc. These resources are valuable and the teachers have become experts in using them and rely on them more because of the results and learning goals met by students.
Ultimately, the value of Internet resources in education is correlated to how effectively they are utilized and ultimately the result in student learning. I don’t want to blog my students to death and I believe that they should be exposed to several appropriate, relevant and valuable Internet tools that will positively affect their learning.
What do you consider to be the most valuable educational Internet resources and why? What successes have you had using them with students and how did you know your students learned from them?
nancy
12 years ago
I think one of the most valuable educational internet resources is anything that will provide students/teachers with answers. In all learning experiences there will be situations that students, learners, teachers will need a reference topics, information as back-up per say. Various internet sites such Wikipedia, Online Encyclopedia Brittannica, Google, Bing, Encarta, the list can go on forever. I found it successful with students because it taught them to find information through various from different mediums. A bit of eveidence that to show that studnets learned from it is that students formed their favorite site to use as a primary source.
ReplyDeleteLisa Allen