What makes an effective website?

Have you ever come across a website that you just thought was awful? Maybe, the pictures came up as boxes with question marks, or had html code all over the screen. Clicking on links that don't even work, bringing you to another page that doesn't exist. Or perhaps all of the information is there, but in one big chunk, or not easy to navigate. These are some elements among others that make a website ineffective, and you want to make sure that those are avoided at all costs when creating a website.

In order to make an effective website there are many different elements involved. You need to decide who your audience will be. If you don't know who your audience is there is no way for you to direct the content and style of your site to fit their needs, and will lack the structure necessary for it to be an effective website. Your website should have a visual theme, and should not look like a mosaic of different elements haphazardly put together. Unless of course this would be appealing to your audience. The information on your site should be broken into manageable pieces, similar to the way you give your students pieces of information one at a time as you go through a unit. Links should work, and be provided for navigation within your site, so the back browser button is not needed to return to a different page or the home page. And lastly, each page should be designed, there should not be pages left unfinished, or unorganized with elements missing.

It's also important to keep in mind what people are looking at when they evaluate your site. Who is the person behind the site? What is the site about, and is it useable? When was the site created and last updated? Where is all this stuff coming from? Why am I looking here for this information and not somewhere else? If you have all the elements above, and you do not fail when you ask yourself the questions people are asking about your site, then you are on your way to a great website!

What is the value of webquests in education?

Webquests are a great resource for involving students in higher-order thinking. Imagine a school, where you go in every day, and answer questions from a textbook or workbook. Now imagine a school where students go on the computer and are researching a topic, analyzing the information found, making comparisons, and drawing conclusions based on these activities. The latter are the types of work that make students think, that go beyond giving definitions, or answering short questions, but move into the higher-order thinking processes of analysis and creation. Webquests allow students to work at their own pace, and are of great value to education due to the critical thinking and analysis aspects contained within.

These webquests can take place over a short period of time (one to three class periods or a weekend homework assignment), or take place over a couple of weeks. Longer webquests however are more difficult to implement in the classroom, because it is difficult to provide all of the information and tasks needed for a longer webquest on one website that is manageable for the students. By merely bringing in the use of a computer with my smartboard, I have found in my own classroom that math suddenly becomes much more engaging for students. Now give them the opportunity to explore websites on their own, and you will be pleasantly surprised at the new found excellent work ethics in students. Just make sure that their searches are geared towards obtaining the learning objectives at hand and not spent on finding out the scores from the games on tv last night!

Planning Instruction & Assessment

Classroom instruction and assessment are c0-dependent and tied together throughout a lesson. There is no way to decide what to teach, without first understanding what your students already know about a topic. When explaining material, teachers must also look at the body language of their students as they are explaining concepts, listen to students' answers to questions, and react to students' responses. A curriculum web needs to have built-in to it these aids that the teacher provides in person to students to help them along the way. In order to do so it is extremely important to anticipate these needs of the students. Instructional supports on a curriculum web may include; glossaries, visual organizers, links to videos, examples, review pages, etc. 

In order to assess learning it is best to use authentic assessments, in other words, assess them in a way that is relevant to the real-world. However, often standardized testing methods are also implemented in my classroom as students will need to be able to perform in these environments as well in the academic setting. In all assessments however, it is crucial that they are linked to the learning objectives to assess whether or not these have been met. Creating a rubric for a project is a great way for both students and teachers to assess students work. In this way students have the opportunity to assess for themselves how they are meeting expectations.

Learner Activities

What makes a great learner activity? Well, it all depends on what your goals of the activity are. Learner activities are similar to exams, in that you don't want to start off with the most difficult question. This can leave students discouraged and may prevent them from even continuing with the rest of their exam. For a learner activity you should begin with simpler tasks, then move onto more complex tasks in order to prevent students from becoming discouraged. This also ensures that they have the necessary foundations before moving on with an activity. 

Another great strategy to use for learner activities is to have different paths available within the activities to achieve the learning objectives. One method our text talks about is giving a pretest to sort students out who may need a remedial activity before beginning the activity, and then an enrichment activity at the end for those students who finish early. These of course, can become more and more complex, as you add in multiple paths between in achieving the learning objectives, and may be based on student interest or learning styles.

The curriculum webs textbook also goes into a lengthy list of different criteria for selecting activities, but the one I felt really hit home for math class was to make sure that the activity is authentic. If it is tying in real life applications of the math, and modeling things that actually occur in the "real world" then these tasks become more meaningful for students. They also form a connection for students and make what they are doing in school relevant for their lives. For instance, rather than simply having students practice writing out numbers in words, have them practice writing the numbers on the appropriate line on a check.

Here are some links to activities that I found on the internet that relate to the curriculum area (graphing, and interpreting graphs) that I will be working on with my sixth graders.

I'm still working on filtering some of these websites, but as parent teacher conferences are tomorrow and it's almost midnight this will have to do until I can come back and edit...enjoy!

Gamequarium

Math 6 Spy Guys

Pie Chart

Circle Graph

Bar Graph

Curriculum Area - How is it related to technology?

Tell your students that the area of a trapezoid is equal to one half the height times the sum of the bases, then showing them visually on the board how cutting a trapezoid in half will turn it into a parallelogram, hence where the formula comes from and watch as their eyes glaze over. Then turn on your smarboard to the powerpoint slide, where the formula is written in the exact same way you wrote on the chalkboard, click the link to the concepts in motion where the picture you drew on the board is colored in and animated and watch as every student's eyes are suddenly paying attention even though they may have already understood the concept.

Technology has become such an integral part of so many of our lives, that its absence has the ability to bore us, and make us feel as though we are ready to tune out. Yes, you may say that there is no difference between having color-coded notes on a chalkboard, and having those same notes on a powerpoint slide, but ask a student and they will tell you a very different story. Maybe the information is the same, but the way it is presented is in a way that engages students differently. No matter what the subject matter, I have realized from my students that if we don't incorporate technology in any small way into that topic that students will suddenly feel bored and disengage themselves from learning.

Website Evaluation

This week we searched for math websites online under a bit of a high pressure game. The rules of the game were that we needed to post five math websites to our class' discussion board without repeating websites that other students had posted. Had the task been to merely post five relevant math websites for teachers/students I would have seen no problem. However, as students began posting sites I noticed that all of the sites I used were already being posted. Now I had to go find new websites, and as quickly as possible determine whether it was worth posting to the discussion board or not.

After reading the website evaluation articles given to us in class I realize that there is much more to "glancing over" a website to determine whether or not it would be relevant or useful for fellow math teachers. While I have noticed the date websites were last updated before, I do not find myself searching for that information when I am browsing websites. Usually if I linked to it through google, or heard of the site through a friend and feel that the interface is user friendly I have no problem with the website at all. Now I find out that I'm supposed to be questioning who made the website, and where the information came from to name a few. And I thought research on the web was supposed to easier.

In some regards doing research on the web is easier, but when did you ever hear of people thirty years ago doing research at the library wondering if a book was a legitimate resource or not? Now I'm supposed to decide based on information provided to me on a website, whether or not it is credible? Well how do I know if the person who created the website is actually telling the truth about their background if I cannot find any other information about them on the internet. There are no laws that say you can't lie about yourself on your own website. So this process of evaluating websites is becoming more complex than I had ever realized before...

Copyright

Each time I distribute exams to my students I remind them that they should do the work on their own, and that copying or talking will earn them a zero on their exam. After reading more about copyright laws, I am starting to realize that I may in fact be breaking copyright laws every single day in my classroom. At the start of the year I was given a workbook, from which I have been making numerous photocopies from to distribute to my students for practice. Not once did I even think that there was anything wrong with what I was doing. My students needed to practice the problems, and I didn't think twice about whether or not I could be breaking any copyright laws. Apparently, I was. Workbooks are supposed to be written in by students, and are only to be filled out once by one student. What was the point of my school giving me this one workbook if I am legally not allowed to make copies from it to distribute to my students? Was I supposed to come up with my own problems and type up my own worksheets? Perhaps. Now that I am aware of the fact that what I have been doing for the past six months is not allowed, do I keep doing it anyway, under the assumption that nothing is going to happen to me.

Who is going to track down, and watch to make sure that copyright laws are not being broken? I'm sure if whoever was in charge of this could go around finding everyone in violation of copyright laws the courts would be booked for an extremely long time. Perhaps, so long that many people might never have to show up in court. Now there are many other problems going on in this world, much bigger than copyright laws, and maybe that is the reason why they haven't been revised in 1998. With the access to information in today's world being so easily accessible, how do we keep the integrity of these copyright laws in place, and prevent people from continuously breaking copyright laws each day? In some regards, people don't really see the copying that they are doing as wrong, and maybe they have valid points in their own minds' but that does not make it right.

Where do we draw the line so that these copyright laws can actually be effective? As humans if we get away with something we are going to be enticed to continue to try to get away with what we are doing, even if we are punished down the road, because we knew we got away with it before. When the government started coming down on people for illegally downloading music do you really think that those people that were caught started buying CDs and did not illegally obtain music ever again. I highly doubt they suddenly started purchasing every single song they wanted to hear. Unless breaking copyright laws becomes something very difficult to ever get away with I don't think they will be effective to an extent that those who wrote the law intended it.