Tuesday, July 15, 2008

eduscapes review

The website eduscapes.com, http://eduscapes.com/, has a variety of links that will be helpful for teachers of all grade levels K-12 and for their professional development. Created by two teachers who now teach at the college level, eduscapes.com is user friendly and very relevant for teachers today. Eduscapes has a variety of links to themed areas such as teacher tap, which contains a variety of professional development links, and literature learning ladders, which contains links to a wide variety of literature activities and web quests. The section 42explore provides content area pages for over 200 topics with 4 links to explore that contain additional resources and links for the content area.
The reason I chose this site is because I originally found it solely for the purpose of learning about Boolean Search strategies which was one of my weaknesses in the technology survey that I took for our class. After viewing a short tutorial on search strategies, I found myself exploring the rest of this site. There are many different areas which can be used for the classroom, for personal and professional development. One of the weaknesses of this site, though very infrequent, is that the links don't always work. While it can be frustrating to find that a link is no longer available, I found that the majority of the links are working, and there are many alternative links to choose from.
The authors have also included a news link for information on their upcoming online professional development courses and latest additions to the site. Teachers can use the site for professional development--there are 4 different online courses upcoming in Fall 2008 and also for their classrooms. The technology link includes a section on using hand held devices in the classroom, publishing tools and multimedia. All in all this website provides a great starting point to explore technology from both the teacher's point of view and the learner's point of view. I highly recommend it!

Thursday, July 10, 2008

there's a first for everything.

This is my first blog. Up until now, I've never even wanted to blog... now, well, we'll see.