Chapter 6

Chapter 6 – Teaching with Educational Websites

Focus Question: How might educational websites provide interactive and engaging learning experience for students?
Educational websites are a great way for students to learn in new and innovative ways. My favorite type of educational website is student-to-expert communication websites, these sites allow students to communicate with experts in the subject matter they are interested in. This “virtual” tutoring can help students stay engaged in their studies because they are getting first hand responses from experts in the field. For example, if a student were learning about space, and they had the opportunity to speak with someone from NASA, I believe they would construct creative questions to ask, and they would put in a greater effort to study the responses rather than reading facts from a textbook. Other educational websites allow students to explore different aspects of a subject matter. Through hands-on learning students stay more interested in what they are learning because it requires less effort to keep interest. For example Hands On Universe allows students to conduct scientific experiments using data from space telescopes. A student using this website would be much more interested in the data and information that they can physically see and manipulate versus a student that is reading data off of a page of text. The hands-on approach also helps students retain the information rather than just memorizing.

Tech Tool Link: The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc
This tech tool link if a virtual field trip of a cave in France. I found this tech tool link to be interesting, although I do not believe that virtual fieldtrips should replace actual fieldtrips. Through this website students can explore historic, geographic and archeological content of the cave and they can access all of the different paintings found within. What I enjoyed the most about this site was that many of the words in the text were highlighted and defined. This was helpful because it allows students of different ages to be able to use this website and learn more independently. The website is very thorough with its information and I believe that websites such as this one can definitely help students learn about different areas of the world that they would not normally have access to.

 

Chapter 6 introduced a lot of new technologies for both students and teachers that can benefit both parties use technology in the classroom more efficiently. The first part of the chapter provided information for teachers that I find to be a bit outdated, many people using the internet are very aware of how to add websites to favorites or bookmark important websites. This however, supports a topic that is brought up in the chapter which is that information is evolving at a very fast pace and textbooks are having a difficult time keeping up. With that being said, the chapter does provide many different websites that are used as social bookmarking; such as delicious which can help connect students and teachers, and allows teachers to share a vast amount of helpful websites with their students. The second half of this chapter introduced a large amount of educational websites that many teachers are adapting into their lesson plans because they are providing interactive ways for students to learn efficiently through technology. These websites are secure, safe, and reliable which is my most important concern when exposing students to the internet. One of the websites that I really enjoyed was Ask Dr. Math because it was very easy to navigate and provided simple and easy to understand answers to many math problems. They also allow students to send questions that may not be answered in the website which will then be answered by a math expert. This website can be used both in the classroom as a supplement for a lesson, or at home as a homework or study aid. Another great website for younger students was PBS kids which has a variety of educational games, videos, and blogs that are related to their characters and TV shows. This allows younger students to learn while using their favorite TV shows to maintain interest.