I just want to be famous. The 2.0 Story.

With the tagline, Broadcast Yourself, YouTube has become a worldwide phenomenon. This Web 2.0 tool is used for many purposes. These purposes stretch from making a video for class, taping someone doing something funny or out of the ordinary, singing, dancing, and much more. Anyone from little children to great-grandparents can use this web as a platform for their videos. You Tube is not only great for posting videos, but has a wide range of a video collection to view. The user can view "Spotlighted" videos that are current with the latest events, "Recommended for You" videos based on what the user has previously viewed, "Videos Being Watched Now" by other users, "Featured Videos" and "Most Popular". This means that if you go to YouTube, you are not a lost little puppy trying to find something interesting. Everything that a user could want is easily attainable. With this Web 2.0 tool you can also combine other Web 2.0 tools. For instance, if I like a certain video, I can take that video and post it on my Facebook account so other people can see it. Smart marketing move by the YouTube creators!





Now, this is not to say that posting videos on this site is just for the pure entertainment of things. YouTube also can be used for educational purposes. Any age could benefit in some way from the use of this tool. But just like the World Wide Web, there are some videos that just don't have good, correct information. User Beware! Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked by many school districts because for every good, sound piece of educational material on the site, there are many more that are not appropriate for school aged children. There are ways to block certain types of videos and age restrictions on some videos, but in the end, it would be up to the parents and teachers to teach correct ways to use this tool.

I could think of some great ways to use YouTube in my classroom if I could get around the site being blocked by our district. Our school has 2 video cameras to be signed out by teachers. I would assign the students, in small groups, to be “teachers” of a certain lesson. I teach junior high math, and my students really like when we get into geometry. Each group would take a geometric shape. Learn about it. Its sides, angles, how to find area and volume…etc, and they would put together a skit. This skit would be anywhere between 5-10 minutes. They could use the internet, books, even YouTube to research other videos that would be similar. I would give the groups 2 days to come up with the research and information, 2 days to create the skit, 1 day to practice the skit, and 1 day to film. The groups would present the skits in class all while being videotaped (pending parental and school permission). After the skits, part of the grade would be to upload their skits on YouTube. Can you imagine the pride that these students would have with creating something so wonderful and then giving the world the opportunity to view their creations? Amazing!

One of these WebQuest's is not like the other...

With some really great, inquiry based websites out there, I am sure there are just as many not so great ones. Let me first begin by saying being an educator myself, I truly hold a special place in my heart for those teachers who go the extra mile to try and incorperate technology and “new” ways to get their students involved and thinking. Not all educators have that skill or even want to embrace these different learning styles. With that being said, I do know that not all educators have the background to pull off a great inquiry based lesson themselves. For a project, I took a look at 10 inquiry based lessons that teachers created. I used a rubric that I created to rank them and I found it interesting how different they all truly were. The good lessons that I found to be intriguing had many of the same qualities. The lessons that scored low were missing a lot of the important things that are part of an inquiry based lesson. Not to say that these lower scoring web lessons couldn’t be easily fixed by tweeking certain parts and maybe having another teacher, perhaps a gifted specialist, help with making the lesson.
In the WebQuest, The Fire Burns On, the teacher pulls the intended student in with a task. This teacher poses the following question, How much do you know about the events of the year you were born? What headlines were topping the news? Who won the World Series? Do you know who was President or what was popular at the movies? I chose this lesson as a great WebQuest with much potential because the idea is a simple yet great one. The generation that we teach doesn’t really know much about their existence. If they don’t know about their life, how can we expect them to learn about events that happened 200 years ago? I don’t see this lesson being a hard core benchmark goal assignment but I can see this being a very cool way to do an extra credit assignment or making this a culminating activity that can be changed a little to incorporate world events for history class, social studies, or government.



The WebQuest that I gave a lower score to was titled, American Presidents. This lesson didn’t really welcome higher leveled thinking skills and there just wasn’t enough to span the three weeks that the lesson was supposed to last. I actually taught a one week curriculum on American Presidents and I feel that there really is so much more that this teacher could have added to this lesson. Again, this Inquiry lesson is a perfect example of how using some other people’s inputs can be beneficial.

~ 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.