Website Evaluation Perfection Reflection

I found a perfect website for young students ... National Geographic for Kids. This website offers activities, photos, videos, and more for young children to do inside the classroom, outside the classroom, or both. I knew about this website beforehand because I am NG magazine member. However, I did not get a chance to explore. I was pleasantly surprised to find some familiar ideas for classroom activities from my childhood and newer ones for this generation of technology gurus. I have confidence most children could navigate this website with ease and could learn many things from the interesting reading material, visuals, and videos posted frequently to National Geographic for Kids. I could use this resource for classroom activities or assigned reading/homework in or out of class if I wanted to teach younger children.

Website Evaluation

I found a neat resource for evaluating websites in 486 today: http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

This website lists criteria for evaluating a website and contains real or fictitious examples for almost every category. Five general categories are listed: authority, accuracy, objectivty, currency, and coverage. This website was sponsored by New Mexico State University and their library department. Updated 2009.

Wiki Experience

Today we worked on our wiki pages at PBSWorks. I had a little trouble with editing images at first but found lots of cool links to post for videos and other pages to connect to mine. I like the idea of having my own webpage to share with my peers and future students. I did not choose to wrap text because my preference is for images to be separated from text. I enjoyed class today!

Course Expectations

In this course I am expecting to learn more about how to use technology in the classroom. I consider myself to be fluent in most computer operations and internet websites. I do not know a lot about blogging but I pick up most internet applications fairly quickly. I hope to learn more about wikis because I enjoy Wikipedia very much. I have even donated to their yearly fund on several occasions. I think wikipedia is extraordinary and cannot wait to learn more!

486 Intro.

Hello, my name is Whitaker Hoskins. I am a senior in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I am currently seeking my minor in education and will go to the graduate school for science education next year to do my internship. I am interested in teaching high school or middle school biology. I enjoy the outdoors and work in the mycology lab on campus. I want to become a teacher because I believe children can greatly benefit from knowledge. I take pride in my knowledge of biology and want to inspire children with the wonderful living world that surrounds them. More and more children neglect the outdoors and have no connection to nature and if our planet would greatly benefit from a new generation that appreciates their surroundings.