Helping Students Find Quality Information and Write Better Reports
The Internet is a vast repository of information – the good, the bad, and the ugly! Discover how to guide your students to the good stuff, safely and efficiently. Help them organize information from multiple sources, validate its accuracy, and improve their writing.
View Presentation from Rialto USD Gifted and Talented Education Conference.
The Common Core Standards call for collaborative writing and the integration of technology. Discover how to use student blogs to improve writing and engage students in peer feedback, while maintaining safety and security for students. Have fun using Google Docs for shared writing activities.
View Presentation from Rialto USD Gifted and Talented Education Conference.
Create, Manage, and Monitor Web-based Learning
Discover easy to use tools to create online tutorials for your class. Then use these and other online resources to create digital learning pathways for students and check their understanding as they progress.
View Presentation from Rialto USD Gifted and Talented Education Conference
One of the biggest challenges teacher face integrating the use of Internet resources in their classroom is getting students to the selected resources and ensuring they use them in a meaningful way. You can post links on your class web page, but you soon end up with a long list of links, students clicking and scrolling rather than really digging deep, and little assurance that learning is actually occurring in all those young minds. Some teachers create worksheets that ask students to answer questions using the website content, but then you have papers to grade and they are often skimming for a quick answer rather than reading for meaning.
Years ago I taught teachers to create webquests, an online problem-based learning activity. These are wonderful and definitely worth the time it takes to develop and implement them. However, you also need a tool for those everyday kinds of experiences where they need to learn something and demonstrate their understanding.
Say for example, that you want students to
You can do this using sidevibe.com. Using this free website, you can create a pathway of online learning, check their understanding along the way, collect their thinking through discussions or private reflections, and respond to them in a timely manner. Watch the video on their website, create a free account and get started designing web-based learning experiences where students are in the driver’s seat, navigating their learning and sharing their thinking with each other and you!