Sunday, January 17, 2010
~ The value of Internet resources for education:Only the Strong Survive
With the World Wide Web at anyone's fingertips, there are mountains of information out there on any given subject. With this being said, it is therefore just as difficult to know what makes a credible source. How do we know if these educational resources are going to help or hinder the knowledge that we wish our students to acquire? We don’t have to walk into this blindly, however, because many people have worked hard to create rubrics for curriculum webs. These rubrics have proven to be a useful tool in ranking teacher created websites. With the best curriculum webs and resources on the WWW, most of these resources for students can promote higher level thinking skills that basic classroom textbooks just cannot provide. Since our goal as educators is to provide opportunities for all students to acquire these higher level skills, it is sometimes hard to find new, interesting ways to bring this into the classroom and have students interested in learning. Books cannot interact with students and books are not regularly updated to stay with current trends and data. The future of our classrooms will lie with technology overtaking all types of learning, it is crucial that teachers start understanding how to create learning on the web. Teachers can take courses or read on how to create curriculum webs. It is a simple skill and can be as easy or difficult as needed but the truth is that some curriculum webs are not very good and are not doing students any good by completing them. The good educational websites can play a key role within the classroom as well as outside. Just think of the future of education and the way we can use the internet to our advantage and our student’s as well. Students can either instantaneously have the answers to their questions or they can work hard to solve a problem with the help of something like a curriculum web. Think of a student in your classroom. If a teacher or parent asks a question that is unknown to that student, where is the first place they go to receive an answer? I am sure that almost 100 percent of the time this student will go to the Internet and not a book. If we all created well made webs that had great resources and well thought out lessons and tasks, we could try to eliminate the bad websites and resources and only let the strong survive.
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Today's students have become so accustomed to instantaneous everything that I think it requires extreme ingenuity on our parts as educators to get them motivated to participate in higher level processes. While we know that higher order thinking is more meaningful and promotes more authentic learning, we are dealing with an audience that has a short attention span and demands immediate gratification.
ReplyDeleteWhile I applaud your enthusiasm for the concept of curriculum webs, I think the reality of what is out there is pretty poor. Too many teachers who think they are good educators and feel compelled to flaunt their expertise for the rest of us to admire. Sadly, however, their web activities are in my mind merely cluttering up the technology highway.
I wholeheartedly agree that teachers need to create lessons that will engage the students in ways that a textbook cannot. Utilizing the Internet as the enhancement is not the end all be all though. Many teachers have become so comfortable with the order in the classroom that teaching from the testbook allows that they are hesitant to let the students have any type of control of their own learning. Until the teachers accept the understanding that students will become excited when they have to take the responsibility of their learning will the paradigm change. If there was a way to ensure that only high quality information was on the Internet, it certainly would make the teachers task less daunting. Until that happens, we will still have teachers using textbooks. It's just easier that way!
ReplyDeleteIt'll never happen that there is only high-quality information. Teachers DO need to check out web sites in advance and direct students to those that are reliable. One way to do this is to rely on lists of links provided by other teachers or others who are interested. At least that narrows down the field of possibilities significantly. It helps to have a set of "friends" on bookmarking sites like Diigo or delicious that can be relied upon to screen out the truly misleading sites.
ReplyDeleteGood thoughts Krue! The crazy part is the set of dictionaries in my classroom are used as clip boards for writing when on the floor rather than looking up words in. Search engines are significantly faster and easier to read. My students are unaware of how to interact with textbooks. Even the fact of reading directions is hard enough for them because they are so used to typing a question into the www and finding the perfect answer. However, teachers are never going to be able to rely solely on the internet because there's never going to be that perfect all-correct website. It's going to be impossible also to know when the information is absolutely correct. Hopefully teachers and parents will learn the benefits of the internet and not rely on it as the teacher.
ReplyDeleteI love your thoughts on the text books not being interactive. It made me think of this clip that I stumbled on. I think it is funny as well as a powerful statement about the place of textbooks as well as Internet resources:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhpmEZWuRQ
I think that we do need to pay attention to our sources, but we have to remember the collective intelligence of groups as well. If we use services like wikipedia or delicious where the whole idea is that many people write or rate the information, we may get a better sense of accurate information than if we just simply accept the "accurate" information of a single textbook editor.
Apple Inc. is planning on releasing a new tablet type of computer and has been talking with all major textbook publishers to place their content into a form that would be appropriate for this new device. I think we are about to see a revolution in how we use interactive textbooks. I can't wait