Ch. 10 Website Reviews

Center for Engineering and Science Education

This website is an interesting tool that can help students make learning connections with other students around the country. It reminded me of the PALS site in that it offers collaborative projects for students in classrooms across the country. Each collaborative project offers project instructions, a teacher guide with lesson plans and templates, a discussion area similar to a blog, a student gallery to post student work, and reference materials. I was particularly interested in one collaborative project called “Square of Life.” Students are going outside in their schoolyards and their homes and looking at living and non-living things that they see. They are then taking that information and comparing it to the things that other students have found and reported on in different areas across the country. They take their information and create a square that represents the living and non-living things where they live. I saw some examples that students had created using some paint and drawing applications. There were also some schools that actually created venn diagrams comparing what they discovered with the data from another school in a different state. It looked like they may have used something like Kidspiration. If my students worked on this project, I could also have them input this information into a spreadsheet with different categories (living things – insects, mammals, reptiles, etc. and also examples of nonliving things – things in the classroom, things on the playground, at home, etc.). My first grade classroom is working on a new plants unit, so they could report on the plants that they grew, as well as the plants that they see outside their school. It would be a great science connection for them.


ThinkFree

This website seems to operate in a way that’s similar to googledocs. If you have an account, you are able to upload and share documents with other people on the web. The reason that I chose to view this website was the Voices from the Classroom section about Allison Watkinson. She talked about how she uses interactive spreadsheets as quizzes and tests for her students. I know many students that would be much more interested in taking a quiz or reviewing vocabulary or spelling words in a format like this. Kids love to use computers in any possible aspect of their schoolwork. From Allison’s description of her own worksheets, it sounds like the students are given instant feedback on whether or not their answers are correct, as well as how they are being scored. I think that this is a great part of the tool as well. It would be interesting to find out if you could include a description for incorrect answers as to why those answers are incorrect, so that the student would have immediate feedback, and know why their answer was incorrect. I know that I would definitely need to learn more about the functionality of it in order to create my own templates and use it with students, but I am definitely interested to discover more about it.


School Spreadsheet Safari

My first impression of this website is that it is kid friendly. The other two sites are definitely geared towards teachers and older users. This site is colorful, it includes graphics, it has large font, and is easy to navigate. It includes definitions of spreadsheets, as well as all of the different tools that you need to know how to use to create a spreadsheet, along with labeled screen shots of actual spreadsheets. It also includes classroom spreadsheet activities in different subjects areas like science, math, social studies, and language arts. It gives a tutorial on how to create a spreadsheet for a spelling test, which would be very useful for spelling reviews and practice for students both at school and at home. It also gives an example of how to create a vocabulary review as well. You type the word in one column and the definition in the other. Then you sort one of the columns so that they do not match. The students can cut them out and sort them so that they are once again correctly matching. They also showed examples for reviewing math facts. I know that the 3rd and 4th graders at my school work quite a bit on reviewing their math facts. This would be a fun way for them to do it, especially if they could create their own review sheets. The website actually seems to be a webquest that a group of students created with their teacher in 2001.