Podcasts

I am not a huge fan of podcasts, just because not all students are going to have access to them because not everyone has itunes, which is what is needed so that students can see it, and it seems kind of pointless in class because I could just talk to the students on my own.
However, I do think that podcasts would be a good project tool for students to use. I think that podcasts could be used in a lot of areas for a lot of reasons. For example, when I made my podcast, I just read "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou and put pictures in to make a point. I think that podcasts could really help with fluency when it comes to students reading out loud. I am particularly thinking about ELLs when I say that reading out loud and being able to hear their words can help them work on fluency.

I think that podcasts are a fun technology thing, but not something that I can see myself using in my classroom just because it seems like a lot of work for something that can be just as effective in another context. I am glad that I learned how to do it, and I think that if the occasion occurs I will definitely use it, but in general, it isn't something that I particuarly enjoy. Gotta try everything once!

Do all Websites tell the Truth?

Answer: Definitely not. There are websites in the world that are so fake but look so real. Case and point: google Martin Luther King or just type in martinlutherking.org. people usually think that .orgs are very reliable websites, but in this case, it is definitely not. .orgs just mean that it is a nonprofit organization. Not an organization that is reliable, but just a non profit organization. If you go to the bottom of the main page of martinlutherking.org, it is created by stormfront, which is a "white pride world wide" group that created the website to trick kids into thinking that Martin Luther King Jr. was really just a horrible person. Imagine that a child would come across this website and believe that it is true.
It is important to teach kids about websites and teach them ways to check to make sure that the information they are looking at is all credible. I think that this is a big problem for a lot of students. You can never start too young when it comes to teaching kids about credibility.

google mapping

Now, I LOVE google maps. You can spend hours on there and never even to get to know everything that there is to know.

For a classroom, Google maps could be used for pretty much any kind of subject or project. If you are studying shakespeare, you could google map all the different locations in britain that were important. Google Maps could really be helpful in history. For example: looking at important points of hte Oregon Trail, or looking at Volcanoes, or any number of things. It can help give students an idea of the distance for different locations especially when it flies from one location to another.

Google maps is a good to look at the geography of a country and can be used as an anticipatory set for a lesson. Also, you could have the students do a google map set about their lives where it goes from their house to school or where they were born or where their favorite place is. This is a good way to get the students involved with different applications.