FREE TEACHER TOOLS

There are pages and pages of awesome resources for teachers out on the net!  It is to a teacher's advantage to use these resources and use them to enhance their lessons and engage their students.  Teacher's are expert Borrowers--just be careful to follow Fair-Use polices!

A few links to good teacher resources:

http://www.techtrain.org/teacher_tools.htm

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/teachertools.htm

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/quizcenter/quizcenter.html

Copyright and Proper Citations (week 7)

Three things I think students should remember about Copyright and FairUse Resources:

1--Most information is FairUse if you use it in limited amounts and for a limited audience.  For example, selecting a quote from a book and using it in your presentation to the class is acceptable, but quoting an entire chapter and putting it up on the school web-page is not.

2--Most information is FairUse if it is being used spontaneously and for educational purposes.  For example, if I am watching the news and a relevant topic comes up, I may record it and share it with my class the next day.  I cannot, however, continue to use that same news-clip year after year.  Most things pass out of the public domain in about 10 days.

3--The information is out there for you to use, but it is your job to use it fairly and give credit where credit is due.  Take the time to look up the proper way to cite, access and share information.  Here are a few sites with good information on this:

http://www.copyrightkids.org/

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

Teaching Students to Properly Cite WWW Resources:

Links to good resources:

Using APA Style to Cite and Document Sources

http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite6.html

http://www.lib.duke.edu/libguide/cite/works.cited.html

http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html

Here are instructions and an example of how to cite a web page without an author:

Organization name [no author].  Title of work.  Retrieved month, day, year, from: URL

BBC.  British History Timeline.  Retrieved March 4, 2008 from:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/launch_tl_british.shtml

WWW Teaching Strategies and Bloom's Taxonomy

Searching the World Wide Web (WWW) Strategies for Students (week 1)

A brief overview: In this modern day and age, teachers must be able to teach their students how to safely and effectively navigate the world wide web to expand their learning. There is a plethora of search engines geared specifically towards students. Learning simple tips, like understanding the meanings of various site names and different ways to phrase search engines will help students navigate the Web more effectively. Furthermore, it is crucial that students be able to evaluate a site for its content not only to insure that they are safe, but that the information is credible.

Searching the WWW Strategies for Students:

1. Tell students to know what they are looking for but at the same time be willing to explore--it's easy to get distracted and sidetracked!
2. Have them try using different key words in the same search to see how different words and phrases produce different search results.  
3. Give them a list of different student search engines they could use--using more than one can provide more complete information on a subject.
4. Emphasis the importance of patience--finding what you need can take time, and furthermore clicking 2 billion times on the same icon will not make it open faster.

Teaching Students How to Evaluate WWW pages:

Tell your students that just because it's on the web, that doesn't mean it is a credible source. 

Be cautious and ASK:

1. Who designed/sponsored this page?  (Are they knowledgeable, biases?)
2. What's the message/purpose of the page?  (To share information, sell something, argue a position?)
3. Where did the information come from?  What are their sources?  (Books, lectures, research?)
4. When was the page last updated?  (Recently?  Is it monitored?  Are there dead links?)

Bloom's Taxonomy Resources (week 5)

A brief overview:  Bloom's Taxonomy categorizes different levels of thinking/questioning.  It begins at the level of Knowledge, and builds up/narrows down to the highest-level of thinking, which is Evaluation.  Teachers can use Bloom's Taxonomy to write objectives for units.  

Links to Web Resources on Bloom's Taxonomy:

http://officeport.com/edu/blooms.htm

http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learning/exams/blooms-taxonomy.html