Week 2 Reflection

MAPping Activity

I chose to investigate the Northwest Tree Octopus. Upon investigating the site, I knew it was a hoax. Personally, I thought the link command was the most helpful. Once I did that, I was taken to several PhotoShop and hoax sites. I also knew to be a bit skeptical since it was a .net and a site called zapatopi, which I’d never heard of before. I chose to search Google, Yahoo, Bing, and HotBot. Google and Yahoo were very disappointing. The main hits were just other informational sites and wikis that couldn’t be trusted. Bing and HotBot, however, were much more likely to bring up hoax websites and Snopes. When I searched for the author, it was a single person named Kevin Fraites, which made me suspicious. The history activity didn’t offer me much information. I’m definitely going to use the link command more often to double-check my sources. To be honest, I’m fairly confident in the sites I’ve used in the past simply because I’m an English teacher and have a good sense of credible websites. I teach my students these skills every year around research time.

Implications

If we fail to teach these skills to our students, the implications could be enormous. Think of all the evil that has happened in our history due to false propaganda. If our students can’t determine the credibility of websites that are intentionally designed to sway their opinions, they could be in a lot of trouble. With the popularity of wikis and personal websites, students must be aware of the information they are viewing. Just imagine what a student could find on a search of Barack Obama if he didn’t know which sources had factual information! In elementary and secondary schools, we monitor our students’ research and keep them on safe sites. We are also more forgiving if they steer off course. In college, they will be expected to do almost all their research on their own. And trust me, if they even mention Wikipedia in their research paper, their professor will butcher their grade.

Delicious

Although I’ve known about Delicious for a while, I haven’t used it until now. I like that you can access your bookmarks from any computer, but I already had that with Google. The network feature is interesting, and I’d like to look into that more. I was considering having my students use Delicious during research projects to share information they find. They would also be able to access a list of sites that I’ve arranged for them. If each student were to contribute two bookmarks about the information we were studying, it would be quite a collection.

Google Reader

Google Reader is amazing! I especially like that you can embed the blogs you follow into your own blog and have everything on one page! It saves so much time. A few years ago, I had my students create blogs for characters in literature. I used a similar site called BlogRoll to keep up with my students’ posts. I was able to check the blogs the minute they were updated. I plan on using Google Reader to do this with my students’ blogs this coming school year.

Wikis

I created my wiki as an addition to my class website. I prefer to keep my class site on Google because I feel I can personalize it a bit more. I do like the idea of the wiki to collaborate with my students. I plan on my students’ using it to post their writings and complete peer editing. I did that a bit in one of my other ETEC class last semester and enjoyed the outcome. I was also thinking it would be a great place for students to share and organize group projects, i.e. to do lists, helpful sites, assignments, etc. I’ve started creating my pages, but I won’t be able to try anything out until the coming school year.

Wikis-Pros and Cons

Advantages to using wikis would be sharing ideas, collaborating, and organizing information. Digital natives would appreciate the ease of the edit tab that looks similar to a word processor. They would appreciate the simplicity of updating the wiki instead of sending out mass emails. The one disadvantage I see is that it is easy to accidentally erase or change others’ work on a wiki and this aspect may make digital natives nervous. Heck, it makes me nervous whenever I edit our ETEC 524 wiki. Also, others may not appreciate their ideas or input being editing or erased completely. You definitely have to set ground rules on wiki etiquette before you get started.

ELearning Tools Wiki

To be honest, I’d heard of most of these sites already and have used several of them. I noticed some of the categories hadn’t been update in almost two years, and there are a few really great sites that should be added like Glogster. I did think that Gabbly, an embeddable chat box for your website, looked interesting. I was thinking it may be a neat way to discuss things with my students on the website without worrying about log-ins, etc. I also liked Dipity, an interactive timeline maker. You can add photos and links to other sites. This would be great for mapping out literary periods or even the plot of a novel.