Standards for the 21st Century Learner

It is nice to have a base to build the implementation of technologies into the classroom with my student. I will keep this in my resources for future reference when I am building my lesson plans and working with curriculums. This article also helped to clarify what is to be expected of students and helped me to begin formulating how to support children in obtaining the skills listed in these standards.

Education for the 21st Century: The Basics

Education for the 21st Century gave me a sort of wake up call. It pointed out that I am not as up to date on technologies as I thought I was. That children will be coming into my classroom with a knowledge based in technologies that was unknown to me when I was going through school. Today's students are growing up in a media rich, immediate, fast, engaging, dynamic and instant environment and I realize now that the classroom strategies and resources need to match what the students are exposed to in their environment. Feedback to students needs to be increased and quick and content needs to yield immediate gratification. This article also helped me to confirm that the students we will be working with need group interactions and opportunities to collaborate, be creative, and have access to various forms of media. The section of the eight characteristics of 21st century teachers, adaptor, visionary, collaborator, risk taker, learner, communicator, model, and leader put working with 21st century students into perspective and have given me a base to build my pedagogy on.

Creative Commons

I am glad that there is an organization available to support the cultural, educational, and scientific creative growth. With so many laws and battles over "rights" it is refreshing to see and know that there are people who are willing to provide and share their creative talents without the need for compensation. This article was brief and referred to their website for additional information which I also found interesting. I feel that it is important to teach our students about copyright laws not only for their own protection of not plagiarizing but also to show them that their creative idea's deserve protecting also and that they can also copyright their works of creativity.

Copyright 101

while I found this article interesting I was disappointed that it did not discuss more rights around images and copyright use for the Internet. It is always good to review the laws of copyrights so I am thankful to have an article that I can keep in my file of resources to refer to when I feel in question of whether I am within the Educational Fair Use laws or not. The examples that were provided help to clarify some gray areas that I am sure will come up while working in the educational field. I was not aware of the 5 exclusive rights or the 4 qualifiers which the courts use to determine if a Fair Use copyright law has been broken.

Universal Design of Web Pages in Class Projects

While I am not sure I would use the objectives in teaching my kindergarten classroom these objectives were super helpful for me to begin to unfold the important elements of websites and what to consider when developing my site. Shamefully I have to admit that I had not considered how the internet is accessed for those with disabilities. I had thought what a wonderful tool for the hearing impaired now instant messaging and texting are a common way of communicating. I had not considered the design elements with colors and those who are color blind or have difficulty viewing certain colors, let alone how to make a web site that is accessible to someone who is blind. I know that when I begin surfing the web that I will now be looking to see how other people have developed their web sites to meet the needs of all individuals.

Design Your Web Site from the Bottom Up

Although I do have to say that I found the amount of grammatical errors to be somewhat distracting. However, the context was wonderful. I found the tips about how to develop your content of the web site, how to organize your content, developing categories, page layout designs, planning for navigational ease, and how to keep the website simple extremely useful. Websites like Google sites makes building a webquest so very simple so that I can focus on the content of the webpage. I feel that have a properly functioning and up to date web site will be a huge help when communicating with the students and their families. I am a little nervous about developing my own web site and being able to maintain it however the challenge will be well worth it when I am able to communicate assignments, announcements, receive feed back, and share students work. The flow chart helped me to visualize how to categorize the information that I will put into my web site. I was little confused about what a "frame" the article said to use "frames" to create navigational structure, but I was not sure what that meant. There were so many wonderful pointers in this article. This article will definitely be one to keep in my file of resources.

FOCUS: Five Rules for Writing a Great WebQuest

The acronym of FOCUS directly and cohesively sums up the key components of a great webquest. I will most like use this acronym when thinking about and developing webquest for future classes and groups of students. I was shocked but not totally surprised at the amount of web pages that are currently on the web, 550 billion! I was more intrigued that general search engines only tap into the top 1 billion web pages. I need to deepen my own unfolding of the internet and hope that in my development of future web quest that I will be able to find links that accesses the deeper realms of the internet. I will definitely be bookmarking sites like Thomas. Webquest are a wonderful way to help students weed through the garbage of the internet to focus on relevant and useful information that supports lessons and learning. I feel that it is also equally important to be as organized as you can be. The more organized you are the more prepared and the larger impact you will have on your students. I really liked the ideas around organizing your resources and how to adapt your lesson to utilize the materials that you have available. Great task that encourage critical thinking will be my challenge. I can see how a teacher can develop poor webquest that turn into simple find the information and repeat it in a new form. Getting children to think critically about information will definitely be the key to making webquest successful.