EDUCATIONAL WEBSITES

Scholastic
homework hub
This gives students help with their homework. It includes articles that teach about memorization devices, where to obtain research, note-taking tips, taking multiple choice tests, and more. These articles are short and simple so that students can easily understand the information provided. There is a flashcard creator that help students to create their own flashcards for math, history, or vocabulary. Students can use the flashcards on the computer or print them out. There is practice quizzes, but they are a little too generic to be very useful. A grammar guide is also available presented in a simple layout. I might use this resource when teaching about research papers because it talks about different types of resources, a grammar guide, information on plagiarism, final draft tips and much more that would useful in helping kids to create a professional paper(for their age!).

Book Central
I thought that this was awesome! Kids can choose their favorite book series and play games, take quizzes, download videos and pod casts, and write their own reviews of the book. The only downfall to this is that some books have many more activities than others. I think that this site could get kids really excited about reading. If we were reading one of the books together as a class I think that it this would be a fun follow-up activity.

Games
This section included a lot of the games in the book central station. But this makes specifically games easily accessible to students. Kids can also join clubs, usually related to books. I went to theU-Solve-it mysteries club and thought that is seemed really cool. But unfortunately purchase was necessary. Also from this site, you can connect to the magic school bus, I spy, Goosebumps, and other popular series books.

Internet

WWW stands for World Wide Web. The world wide web is a group of electronic documents connected together like a web(the last w in www). These documents are stored on servers throughout the world. The web has grown to a means for publishing electronic documents and conduct electronic commerce, such as selling and purchasing goods and services.

In order to teach my students I would explain that the Internet is also called the world wide web. And all around the world people can put new information on the Internet, and people all over the world can look at the information that people put up. I would then ask them, "Do you know any of the things that you can do on the Internet?" I would expect answers such as email, shop, watch movies, get information to write reports etc. I might also explain that while the Internet is good and can help us do a lot of good things, that there are also bad things and it is important to have someone help you when you are using the Internet. I think that it would be neat to show how to e-mail and I would e-mail it to one of my other e-mail addresses so that I could show how fast that it can send to someone anywhere in the world.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. When you enter t he URL of a page it sends a request to the server.

Some common error messages that appear when using the Internet are:

• Error message 404- not found. Either web page doesn't exist or it can't be found. If this appears check the address carefully searching for any mistakes. If the site has a search engine search for what you are looking for.
• Error message 503- Service unavailable. Your Internet service provider is down or you may have lost the connection. If this happens you just have to wait it out.
• Bad File Request. The browser you are using may not be able to decipher the form, or there may be a technical error in the form.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. A set of special codes that tell the web browser how to display text in a document.

Http stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. Http is the method used to transfer hypertext files through the Internet.

I think that the Internet is a very useful resource for students writing papers or working on projects, but most young students don't understand that not everything on the Internet is credible. I think that it is important to explain this to the students and teach them ways to tell whether the source is credible.

imovie

I thought that this assignment was difficult, and very time-consuming. But, I do feel that if you simplified it enough fifth and sixth graders could use imovie. For example have them record footage but not spend too much time editing and adding music. I think that it would depend on the movie. If they made a movie where they had to demonstrate a concept the planning might help them to clearly understand the concept so that they could depict it well to other classmates. But while editing technology would probably take precedence depending on how well the students know the technology. I think that in order to make sure that technology doesn't take over you would need to teach about imovie for a few weeks so that it becomes easy to reach the desired product. I might actually use it if I had an older class for vocabulary or other clarifications of topics, but it is unnecessary for topics that are easily understood from typical classroom activity.