Thursday, August 5, 2010
Weebly
A website is different to wikis and blogs. A website is a collection of web pages maintained by a single person or organisation. The host of the website can change the content and layout of the site; add hyperlinks and tools which make them live and interactive. They can be set up businesses for consumers to find information and even purchase goods and services. They can also be used for accessing information.
Their value in the classroom begins with the search, whereby students need to use their constructivist minds to navigate specific sites in order to find relevant information. This skill alone is quickly embedded into a learner’s schema, which allows for the next stage of knowledge construction to take place when they refine and evaluate the worthiness of information.
The weebly website that I created was a fairly easy program to navigate, add an image and some text. I’m sure other material could also be added, which I don’t have the patience for at the moment. However, this seems like a good learning tool that even I could guide students through to create their own website. Given time, I would like to pursue the possibilities of this tool for the classroom. I understand that a web quest is also a website that is interactive. This type of website is designed for learning and I certainly see myself using these in the future.
I can see an increase in the use of websites for educational purposes in the future as classrooms become more technologically driven. Hence it will be important for me to possess the skills to be able to show students how to be critical users when accessing appropriate sites for their education. The major problem involved with websites is that there are many inappropriate sites available on the world wide web and government departments, parents and teachers need to be in positions to filter and scrutinise the material which a child can access.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Michael - Using websites in the classroom allow many learning opportunities for students to explore. One way of using a website (designed by a higher year level student) would be to implement both the construction of ideas about a chosen topic and research that is required for that topic, by making pages on your website that label different categories of information, search engines, related sites, images, sounds, movies, presentation and many more elements. As an assessment tool a web page construction that has the learning evidence displayed using such labelling and links to further knowledge and understandings - would be incorporating higher order thinking skills to demonstrate learning. As web pages can be designed artistically, this would appeal to more visual learners and reinforces the tasks criteria and scaffolded steps to complete the task.
ReplyDelete