Online Reading (Homework due 10/27)

Since I assign research projects I have given this a lot of thought. My own kid who is ten will put anything in the URL--spiders.com, or pudgerodriguez.com--to try to find the information he wants. That's pretty scary, especially considering that when you type in martinlutherking.org you get an anti-king site. So when I assign research projects I ask students to find most of their information from the library data-bases. The student resource center has tons of information and it is all reliable. They can also find articles that are written for their reading levels, which can be helpful for those lower level readers. If they do use google, I encourage them to find sites within the .edu or .gov domains. I know they still use random sites, so I tell them that at the very least they need to know who the source is--where the information is coming from, and to corroborate the information in some way.

Searching Google

I guess I was most surprised by how much I actually knew. I did the entire tutorial and the two things I learned were quite helpful. The first was the short searches. It's cool that you can type something like "Thai food 94030" and get the results so easily. I also liked the "show options" button. I have never used that before and I think it will be helpful to limit my searches.

This assignment took longer than I expected, which is why it's a day late. I started it too late and then couldn't save the quiz so I had to do it all over again. There was probably a way to save it, but I couldn't do it. Oh well....

Library of Congress

I spent some time looking at the Library of Congress website, and what I found that has immediate use for me in the classroom is the site that has the webcasts of the National Book Festivals. At the site you can see various authors reading from their latest or most important works. I viewed Rick Riordan, a children's author who my son adores, and Tim O'Brien, the author of Things They Carried, a book I'll be teaching in the spring. There is also a link to "Poetry Out Loud," which shows people reading either poems they love or their own poems. There is even a link to student winners, which is fun to listen to. The website not only has the 2009 festival, but many from years past, so there are a lot of authors to find.

I also enjoyed the Calisphere site. What I like about that site is how easy it is to navigate. It is easy to click on reliable websites and other primary source links. This is going to be useful throughout the year.