Inaugural blog post!

The basics covered in the first chapter of Web Literacy for Educators didn't provide me with very much new information. The information covered about domain names and HTML I learned through observing my own use of the internet and because I used to create websites for fun.

I did, however, look up the Victorian Robots website and thought it was a great resource for teaching students about the validity of websites.

I also really liked that the second chapter had a lot of resources for students and teachers alike when doing research. I plan to spend more time looking up some of the ones I hadn't heard of or used before, like NoodleTools, and the ones specifically tailed to younger students. I also didn't know that there were entire search engines for podcasts--until this, I'd never thought to try to find a podcast outside of iTunes.

The information presented about different blogs was really interesting as well. I thought that the idea of having students contribute to a class blog like the math teacher in Winnipeg did was great. I was a little bit surprised that the website cited in the book stopped being updated in 2005, but when I went to the teacher's profile I saw that he kept the project going in later classes. It seemed like a great way to have the students work together on this bigger project that would benefit students of Calculus everywhere, stay attentive when taking notes to contribute to the class blog, and learn how to publish blogs responsibly. I'd like to do something like that in a class one day, but it seems like a lofty goal at the moment--for now, I'd be happy with learning how to write a good lesson plan.

I have not looked into RSS feeds much, since I don't read too many blogs, but the explanation of how they work makes it seem really easy and like something that might be really helpful for keeping a lot of information in one place, and a time saver if you're like me and check various news sites regularly.

Overall, what I got from this reading assignment are a lot of resources to look into more deeply, and some ideas for class assignments and websites to use to illustrate points to students.