My WebQuest

Behind the scenes with Cinderella

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/behind-scenes-with-cinderella-261.html?tab=1#tabs

My role is the Altitudinist.

   

Your Impressions

WebQuest	Strengths	Weaknesses
Grow School Greens	Great for research, gets kids involved and excited.	Takes too long to see results. Young ones may lose interest.
Where is My Hero?	Gets kids to research history and get information from real life people.	It limits their creativity.
Underground Railroad	Good to apply knowledge of slaves and slave holders.	Too many process, may take too long.
Ice Cream	Great for creativity.  Allows them to think outside the box.	May get messy if you feed them some ice cream.  And you must feed them ice cream after that.
Ancient Egypt	Good for learning about new cultures.	Seems hard to follow.

 

 

The best webquest would have to be Grow school greens.  It forces the child to be responsible for something.  The webquest has them do research, but then put that research to work.   In the Process it provides individual jobs to be done at the same time promoting teamwork.  This allows room for higher level thinking and help when they get stuck.  At the end of this project they can see all their hard work pay off in the form of produce. 

I feel another good webquest is We all Scream for Ice cream.  This webquest allows children to be creative in the flavors they create and the label they produce for their ice cream product.  It is a great way to mix fun with learning.  This webquests offers the opportunity to analyze how to make ice cream and adding your own fun with your own flavors.  The Advertising allows the children to work as a group and analyze how the best way to get their ice cream flavor out there. This provides additional work for advertisement research.  

I feel the worst is the Ancient Egyptian WebQuest.  I feel the layout of the webquest made it hard to stay on track.  It does encourage them to learn about a new culture, however, there is nothing about individual and group work.  Not forcing children to have their own role in the project allows room for one student being stuck doing all the work.   The eliminates the higher learning for any of the other students.

I feel the worst is also the Unraveling the Underground Railroad.  This webquest allows individual work but the positions that the child holds forces some to be the controller and some the controlled.  This project may be good for bullies to show them how it feels, but it seems like it could cause a negative light on a child.  It is a great idea to teach the children of the underground railroad, but having them act out may go too far.  It doesn’t really offer much analyze of information.  It also hinders their creativity because the only thing they are doing is creating journals after the research.  It does encourage them to synthesize multiple perspectives, I just feel it is not as good as the others. 

The best: are the best because they allow both teamwork and individual work with analyzation of research that is being put to work using your hands to allow the students to remember longer.  These also provide the students with a chance to be creative from growing plants to creating a new ice cream flavor.  These provide a little of analyzing information with synthesizing multiple perspectives at the same time allowing them to use creativity.

The worst: to me are the ones that didn’t provide a little of each point.  These would either provide multiple perspectives but not allow them to be creative.  Or has them analyze work but doesn’t allow them to see different perspectives.   

Storybird

Teacher's First Year by ssuesli2201 on Storybird

Double Journal 12

Summery

            Sex offenders should not be banned from social networks because not all sex offenders actually committed a sexual crime.  Some sex offenders were placed on the list for random things such as: urinating in public, public nudity or streaking, some sex offenders were teenagers who had consensual sex with other teenagers.  This article is a persuasive article to get others to see that not all sex offenders should be punished from social networks because of some sex offenders who actually had sex with underage children.  They also make the argument that it is in our best interest to allow them on social networks to keep track of what they are doing to keep others safe. 

Evidence:

            The fact that some of the sex offenders were placed on the sex offender registry when there was no sexual encounter in the situation is one piece of evidence.  It would be in our interest to allow them to be on social networks to keep track of them.  Also, there were only a very small few cases where the internet was used to form a relationship. 

Validate the Website:

            The domain name makes it a commercial site.  It is a news website.  The author is clearly stated and when the article was written is also clearly stated.  There is short information listing of the author stating what he has done recently and why he is interested in this information.  There are advertisements to make the site proof that it is a commercial site.  The information in the article can be validated using other internet sites.  Also using the links in the article, one downfall of the article is a link goes to more work of the original author however another link gives validation of some of the points made in the article. 

My Position:

            At first I felt that sex offenders have no business on a social networking site.  I looked at it as allowing a sex offending in an elementary classroom; it just doesn’t work well to do so.  However, when I learned that not all sex offenders where in a situation of sexual encounter that some sex offenders are on the list for crimes like urinating in public or public nudity they should be able to be on social networking sites.  First we should allow all sex offenders to be on social networking sites to keep track of where they are and what they are into.  Second we should rethink the sex offender list because if we really have sex offenders who only urinated in public then we have bigger problems with the rights of people then social networking.  I am not saying the public urinaters should go without punishment, but do they really need placed on the sex offenders list? 

5 W's and 1 H of cyberspace

California's Velcro Crop under Challenge (1993)

Who

·         Yes Ken Umback

·         No

·         Yes

·         No

·         No

·         No

What

·         No

·         No

·         Yes

·         No

·         Yes

·         No

·         No

·         No

·         No

·         No

When

·         Yes

·         Yes

·         Yes

Where

·         . com

Why

·         Yes

·         No

·         No

How

Answers of Wikipedia

a.       Wikipedia is a free source of information.  A nonprofit organization.

b.      It is not 100% fool proof; however, it is an excellent place to start for gaining information. 

c.       They have “wisdom of crowds” and volunteers so that if someone edits something with misinformation they have people that validate what is said and then correct it if it is wrong information.  

d.      Larry Sanger left Wikipedia because he believed that Wikipedia should give more authority to experts.  He created his own Citizendium that does just that.

e.      Vandalism appears in the form of someone intentionally blanking a page of information or change the content of a page in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia. 

f.        It reveals that Wikipedia will never be the one stop shop for reliable information.  It is a good place to start but should never be your stopping point.  In theory, it can never work because it will never be perfect.  It will always have some flaws in it. 

g.       It successful because there are others out there that feel that a free source of information is a good thing so they all work together to make it work.  Team work makes it work.

h.      They don’t want to accept advertising because it is a free site they wish to rely on donations.

i.         Wikiscanner scans the IP address of anonymous editors of the Wikipedia site to be easily checked.  It checks for bias used through government and prominent businesses around the world.  

Double Journal 11

I have learned several things in reading about Wikipedia.  I have learned that there are multiple volunteers that oversee the website to make sure that information is a correct as they can get it.  I just assumed it was a bunch of doctors or very smart people that just put the information out there.  I find it fascinating that anyone can edit Wikipedia at anytime.  I find it even more fascinating that the volunteers can oversee those edits and make sure that only the most accurate information is posted. 

I have also learned that it is a free site run off of donations and volunteer work.  They only have ten employees and run such a successful website for educational purposes.  As well as I learned that Wikipedia is not your end destination when looking up information.  Wikipedia is not cited because there are so many known and unknown authors of the site; however, there are lots of references at the bottom of the page to help you move on to get to the end of your destination to do more research elsewhere. 

I was very surprised to find out that in some schools and with some teacher Wikipedia is banned.  I have heard of banning a lot of things but never an informational free website.   Another thing that surprised me was that I didn’t realize it could be done in real time.  Such as with the Virginia Tech shooting, the information provided could have saved some lives if a student were to come across it at the right moment. 

My only question is why would Larry Sanger leave Wikipedia if he thought it was lacking in expertise?  If he is one of the founders then he has the say so to fix the problem that he sees or branch out from Wikipedia to get credible information.  Such as when he created Citizendium why didn’t he just stay with Wikipedia and use the fame from it to help people find more expertise in their information.  Instead of leaving why not just fix the problem?

Related Material:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/10/sunday/main2244008.shtml

References :

Crovitz, D., & Smoot, S. (2000). Wikipedia:friend, not foe. 1-97. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/archival/EnglishJournalArticle2.pdf

Johnson, C. (2009, February 11). The good and the bad of wikipedia. Sunday Morning, Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/10/sunday/main2244008.shtml

Think Aloud

Shana's Think Aloud

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Website Evaluation

In the website that I have chosen I have found that the information could have been provided by anybody due to the commercial domain name.  The person that does claim to have written the site is Ken Umbach and when looking up his information he gives a “Totally Bogus Biography”.  When looking into some of the links programmed into the site it sends you to something totally unrelated or it sends you to something totally ridicules like a picture of random cats.  This website is easily verified due to its ridiculousness tactics used to create this website.