A WebQuest is defined, by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University, as "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet." Five steps are used to make a great WebQuest site: Focus, Orchestrate, Challenge, Use the medium, Scaffold high expectations.
Critical attributes of a successful cooperative learning environment for positive independence are promotion of interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing. Samples of great WebQuest pages include titles of "Task, Background, Process, Resources, and Conclusion. This is defined in terms very close to a project managed with project management techniques: "Introduction, Background, Objective, Statement of Work, Organization, Risk Management, Conflict Resolution, Schedule, Budget, Project Termination, and Conclusion (a reflection of how to do the project better next time." Perhaps Bernie Dodge and others teaching about WebQuest will eventually add some of the other sections of effective project management. Project management skills will be used for the rest of these students lives in their home, workplace, and sports and hobby aspirations.
As far as the Filamentality lesson this week, I thought it very useful for the classroom. When reading about WebQuest, I noticed quite a similarity between the two tools used for students to do their classroom projects.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Blog #7: The Use of Excel Spreadsheets in Class
Microsoft excel is one of the most commonly used and useful software programs. It can process data for businesses, home budgets, and classroom monitoring. For the classroom it can monitor the reach of the learning of students. It can also organize grades and easily process retake scores with no more effort than the teacher just putting in the new number.
I loved the colorful effects that the program has and the way of presenting the data with bar graphs and pie graphs. It had various formulas to choose from to process data, so it's a very flexible program. It will also be a wonderful tool in presenting to the school administrators, since it has such visually appealing pie charts and bar charts to display the data.
The excel quiz was very simple after reading the tutorial. I ended up getting a 9 out of 9 on the first try. It did learn about some equations that I had never heard of before the tutorial.
In the reading, "Teaching Students to Use the Internet as a Research Tool," I discovered ideas that I hadn't thought about. When I do an internet search, I never thought about using more specific search engines like Argos and MathSearch. Other search engines index the entire web which makes the researcher use very specific Boolean techniques or else they'll have thousands of results. Using other search engines also make the researcher have to check the validity of the web page and see what biase it has and if it has credible supporters who have linked to that page. The article also had a lot of web sites for teachers to use, so I'll definitely look at those after I finish tech class and have more free time. :)
In the meantime, I'll be doing some software testing. So far I've found www.riverdeep.net a keeper! I've been not only testing it for potential use with the Algebra II tutorials, I've been using it to study for my CSET on March 17th. At least the CSET is making me test software that is VERY relevant to upper level math right now. I think that I'll let some of my new math teaching friends about this web site, so that they can show how quadratics are used in real life. That's a question that I keep hearing students ask, "Why do I need to know this?" Those tutorials definitely answer that question and teach in a visual and auditory style that keeps my attention.
I loved the colorful effects that the program has and the way of presenting the data with bar graphs and pie graphs. It had various formulas to choose from to process data, so it's a very flexible program. It will also be a wonderful tool in presenting to the school administrators, since it has such visually appealing pie charts and bar charts to display the data.
The excel quiz was very simple after reading the tutorial. I ended up getting a 9 out of 9 on the first try. It did learn about some equations that I had never heard of before the tutorial.
In the reading, "Teaching Students to Use the Internet as a Research Tool," I discovered ideas that I hadn't thought about. When I do an internet search, I never thought about using more specific search engines like Argos and MathSearch. Other search engines index the entire web which makes the researcher use very specific Boolean techniques or else they'll have thousands of results. Using other search engines also make the researcher have to check the validity of the web page and see what biase it has and if it has credible supporters who have linked to that page. The article also had a lot of web sites for teachers to use, so I'll definitely look at those after I finish tech class and have more free time. :)
In the meantime, I'll be doing some software testing. So far I've found www.riverdeep.net a keeper! I've been not only testing it for potential use with the Algebra II tutorials, I've been using it to study for my CSET on March 17th. At least the CSET is making me test software that is VERY relevant to upper level math right now. I think that I'll let some of my new math teaching friends about this web site, so that they can show how quadratics are used in real life. That's a question that I keep hearing students ask, "Why do I need to know this?" Those tutorials definitely answer that question and teach in a visual and auditory style that keeps my attention.
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