Info Overload - Narrow It All Down

Trying to bundle these ideas is a bit of a challenge for me. Yes, I like to read a bit about upcoming theories of education. Yet, how can we discuss good ole fashioned research at the same time. They do go hand in hand, just infuse a bit a technology and it all flows smoothly.

Social Studies: SweetSearch has been around awhile and a student search engine and I may have even mentioned it here, but sometimes if another person pulls together the topic, it is a bit easier for students (and teachers) to get started. So pull together a directory of class resources, a bunch of how to articles for lessons and tons of fun tidbits and that is what you'll find at the SweetSearch Social Studies site. I loved the article called, "10 Reasons Students Shouldn't Cite Wikipedia." The left is a column of more list type sites and the right is the Today in History items so the page itself is dynamic. You could spend most of the summer getting great anecdotal material here.

Science, Civics, Math, and Economics: Any time you have data you have a graph. That is the way of the internet but I'll bet you never saw such a collection of different types of graphs as at Many Eyes. This visualization website hosts over 188,000 data sets on all topics from sports, energy, government, internet, and so much more. Graphs include basic bar, pie, and line and also histograms, treemaps, tag clouds, matrix charts and others.

Searching for Students: In general, most students pull up Google and away they go. That is fine for a savvy searcher, yet Google is overwhelming and only good if you want "popular" information. It also won't tell you what answer the teacher is looking for. SchoolWax is a homework help site that pulls in all the searches most students will need: Dictionary.com, Answer.com, Google Translate, Quizlet, Essay Topics, Citation Builder... However, if the student gets bored during their homework, there is SchoolWaxTV with loads of videos on academic topics. Educators can find videos on their curriculum topics too.

Videos: I'm lost when it comes to YouTube because there are too many videos when I search. Today I stumbled across Classroom Clips and low and behold they are categorized by SOL standard. That is time saving!

Teaching: The Marzano Research Labs are always working on collecting data on the latest trends in education. They study the effectiveness of everything from interactive white boards to providing feedback to students. The latest study at their site shows the gain achieved by using a variety of teaching strategies. Ever wonder if incorporating more cooperative learning techniques is worthwhile? Or what would happen if you focused more on vocabulary? The stats are revealing and worth a look.

Tools to Whittle Away: Richard Byrne is one of the best bloggers for educators because all his ideas are FREE. No one can surf the web anymore, it's just too big. The best way is to learn more about online Social Bookmarking and RSS. This blog entry titled, "Keeping Track of the Good Stuff" explains, using video, the two concepts and why they make learning more a bit easier to manage. And how to avoid waisting time watching those cat videos too.

|