3 Websites, Software, and Newsletters

For my website critique I decided to critique Edmodo since we used it in class and I found it to be a great tool. I decided to use the Website Evaluation Rubric from Chapter 9 of Teaching and Learning with Technology on page 222 of the text. For almost all of the ratings of Edmodo I would give them 5s, an excellent rating. The goal of Edmodo is clear as being a way to collaborate with students, teachers, and parents as well as teaching students about social networking. The design is easily navigable and user friendly because the design is simple and efficient. It includes a site map and search engine as well as easy to read elements. There is a copyright date at the bottom as well as dates for each post and reply visible. Content varies by what the teacher decides to connect with their page, which allows for the content to be more relevant to the topic being covered. Teachers can provide a link to another page to make the content more specialized to the area and provide access to other tools. The only item I would rate lower than a 5 would be handicapped access. While you can link to videos and things that work with sound but you would need to read the text to access the page, for that reason the website is mostly text based. For this reason I would give it a 3 for handicapped access. Edmodo can be found at www.edmodo.com.

My classroom will implement use of computers the most using basic Internet applications like e-mail, search engines, viewing educational videos and pages, and generally surfing the web. I would also like to implement discussion boards and collaboration online with Edmodo or the like. Blog posts, like the ones we do for this class, are a great tool to check understanding of material so I would love to implement them too. Chapter 9 has a list of web tools that are useful for classes. I would like to implement a Learning Management System like Moodle for a virtual classroom. I would like to implement Class Dojo to in my class to monitor behavior. Social Bookmarking tools like Diigo will allow me to share websites with colleagues and describe their usefulness (218-220). Digital citizenship lessons are so important to teach because of how often technology is integrated into class. I will teach them to be polite and kind on the Internet even if they disagree with another person, be careful to protect their identity, be cautious and report inappropriate actions online, be respectful of intellectual property, collaborate with others to learn, as well as learn through their own actions(224-225).  

I learned how to organize word into columns, use word art in titles, and use shapes as borders through doing the newsletter assignment. These skills will be useful in my future classroom so I can create newsletters or other projects through word effectively and creatively. I struggled with formatting the page back to one column after my three column middle  section, but I ended up liking the way I formatted it better for design purposes.