Participate 2.1.1 Collecting Reputable Digital Resources Quest

What were the three most useful tools or resources resulting from the web walkabout?

 1.         Eutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation: http://www.edutopia.org/stw-online-learning-research-roundup

            Edutopia is a web site published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation.  This site has articles by educators and other education professionals, along with resources, videos. The mission of The George Lucas Educational Foundation is to improve the K-12 learning process by "documenting, disseminating, and advocating for innovative, replicable, and evidence-based strategies that prepare students to thrive in their future education, careers, and adult lives". There are several core strategies included in Edutopia and one of these is technology integration. In effectively integrating technology, this site looks at four key components:  active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts.

            Many of the articles published on this site are based on research on online education.  One of these states that “The primary reason school districts offer online courses are to expand what they can offer their students and provide them with classes that would otherwise be unavailable. It is also an effective strategy for personalizing the learning process to meet individual student needs” (Dawley, 2010).  This site also has many research-based articles written by Kathy Schrock, the author of the book, Writing and Research on the Computer. 

            This site is a credible source because the authors and developers are professionals and experts in their field, the purpose is not for profit, but for education, the site is current and is updated often, with constant new research and articles being added often.  The information comes from well-known educational professionals, scientists, researchers, and others who believe in the science of education.  The information is priceless because there are helpful strategies, lessons, informational articles, and countless other resources for those interested in the best that education has to offer.

            This site is definitely scholarly rather than popular because most of the articles and sources are written by educators or educational researchers for other educators, use the technical language of education, and include source citations.

2.         Media Smarts:

            This site is a fantastic site that allows students to learn how to protect their privacy on the internet, .  Not only do student learn through fun and engaging activities how to validate online information; they learn to differentiate between opinion and facts involving internet sources and online content.  This resource also has many helpful teacher’s guides and resources that give some background information for teaching and modeling authentication of online resources and identification of cyberbullies. There are lessons, movies, games, topics, and more for use by any age classrooms.  This is a great site and is funded by a variety of public and private partners.  Students can learn through games, videos, lessons, and activities designed for engagement and focus.  This was my favorite site and I have bookmarked it on Diigo.

3.  Web of Trust

WOT works in a very simple way - it shows website reputations as traffic lights next to search results when using Google, Yahoo!, Bing or any other search engine. They are also visible next to links in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and email like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as well as other popular sites like Wikipedia. By clicking the traffic light icons you can find out more information about a website's reputation and other users' opinions. A green traffic light means users have rated the site as trusted and reliable, red warns about potential threats and yellow indicates that you need to be cautious when using a site.

Karen's Sites for Evaluation

Students can be taught to check for valid content, appropriate vocabulary, stereotypes or age-related attitudes, inclusion of diverse populations.  Teachers need to evaluate all sites when possible, however modeling and teaching students how to recognize valid sources is important.  Students are extremely capable judges of effectiveness of digital resource and should be taught responsible practices to determine if they can learn from the sources.  Share some of the sites bookmarked in this blog with students so they can go through some of the steps for evaluating resources.  Creating an evaluation from that can be used in the classroom in some template form might help get the learners started on using criteria for safely evaluating sites and resources.