Karen, Reaction to Presentations

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation today. I think both groups did a good job and set high standards for the acts to follow!
I liked how the blogging team dealt with the fact that all of us were very familiar with using blogs (because of our class). Instead of focusing on introducing the idea of blogs to us, they went in to depth on the various ways we can incorporate blogs in our classrooms. I think they did an excellent job of presenting the pros and cons of having a class blog that is accessible to all students. I also liked how they introduced the edublogs.org and taught us how to set up an account.
I also really enjoyed the presentation on manipulatives. I wasn't 100 percent sure what a manipulative was but after seeing what Seth, Stephanie and Heidi presented I think that using a manipulative in a lesson would really help intrigue students. I also like the convenience that they provide (as opposed to pencil/paper). I think I am going to record a lot of the resources they offered for future reference!

Presentation/Podcast Plan

Some Ideas:
Start out with the defn. of a search engine.
Scavenger Hunt
What major links did you use?
Strategies for using search engines
other resources that we found:

Angela will share this one with the class:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/SearchEngines.html
This website is useful becuase it offers a table that compares three different popular search engines. The features offered by Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com are listed in a convenient table form so that the advantages of each can be easily viewed. This helps people to decide which search engine is best for them to use in a specific situation, based on certain criteria.

Karen plans to share this one with the class:
http://what-is-what.com/what_is/wikipedia.html
This website describes what wikipedia is. It starts off by showing where the word "wikipedia" originated. What-is-what.com also goes into what the purpose of wikipedia is and how it exists. It discusses the pros and cons of wikipedia. I think that this website provides the reader with a good perspective of what goes on "behind the scenes" with wikipedia. I also think that it does a good job of posing both the good and bad of using wikipedia for a source of information.
Technology Standards: Social, Ethical, And Human Issues


Brian is going to share this website with the class:
http://www.ask.com/#subject:askpg:1
This is an interesting site because it gives students the ability to ask a question and receive several sites that can have the answer. It is highly accurate with the results and they can be really helpful.