Locating Educational Resources
The internet has revolutionized teaching. Now educators are able to access thousands of websites that pertain to the concepts they are teaching. Now how do we go about organizing and saving these sites? Well everyone has their own way of doing things. Using my favorites is an easy and fast way to keep track of sites that I would like to use in the future. However, I dislike that my bookmarked sites aren’t able to communicate between computers. Mobility and sharing are actually one of Delicious’s best qualities. Unfortunately, it was hard getting used to Delicious, so I went back to using my favorites. I think retrieving links on twitter seems like a daunting task because I feel like the information would be scattered. As an educator, I don’t have a lot of time to be searching around on the internet.
Over the summer I participated in a course that showed educators ways of retrieving relevant, reputable information from the internet. I found that these advanced search techniques really helped to get more valuable information. I think it is so cool that you can found out the different countries perspectives on issues by searching through their country code on Google.
I am already familiar with a several of the educational websites listed in our textbook. First, I went to www.atozteacherstuff.com/ and there were loads of commercial ads which leads me to believe that the information found there might not be as reputable as some of the other links I visited. I did find one new website that I bookmarked. Eduhound located at www.Eduhound.com had a many different types of resources found under each educational topic. One of the topic just so happened to be Hawaii and I couldn’t help but to click on it. I found out that my Hawaiian name is Hekele.
You would think a state’s department of education website would be bursting at the seams with great educational sites; however on my search I discovered that many of the state’s sites lacked educational links for teachers. Ideally, our nation should have a national educational website that would contain our education standards for each grade. There you would find links and resources for each of the standards we teach. Also there would be a section where all 4th grade teachers could share ideas from across the country. This site would help educators around the country be more effective in the classroom.
Heather Fowler
