Hi friends!
Simple English Wikipedia:
Avraham mentioned this earlier but I must have missed it. This site can truly be used as a great tool in our classrooms. Even though teachers tend to discourage the use of wikipedia...students more often than not turn to it as a source of first reference. Therefore, I think that teachers can use the simple english wikipedia to their advantage - helping students to research themselves and actually understand what they are reading!
Suggestion: why not get students to make their own wikipedia entry on something learned in class?!
NoodleTools:
Awesome! Not only is this a great tool for teacher to introduce to their students, but its a great website in general to use. It's almost ingenious. How many time have you simple done a google search which has resulted in thousands of results that are not relevant or in the direction that you are researching?! NoodleTools allows you to, from the beginning, refine your search - this in essence is a huge time saver.
On another note, this week I was exposed to a great website called edpuzzle. Basically, what it does is allows you to take a video and input questions that will appear at different intervals automatically. Using it in the classroom would require the teacher to complete the preparation before hand; once in the classroom, all that is require is the press play. Pretty cool! It can also be used as a great homework tool. Teachers can send students a link to a video they have made and students can answer the questions on the website. The teacher is able to access results at the end also.
Here is the link...check it out! http://www.edpuzzle.com/home
Thats all for this week, until next time...have a good one! :)
I wrote on my blog that I'm scared of exposing my students in Simple Wikipedia. As a rule, I don't allow students to use the regular Wikipedia, b/c then they stop looking for original sources. I want them to go searching for alternative sources of information. 2. Copy/Paste is too prominent already and I'm afraid that if they have a simpler source to copy, it will make grading papers more difficult to decide if the students have learned how to paraphrase or not, one of the important skills in the bagrut project rubrics.
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