TeacherTube

  
For this week I explored an online resource for teachers called teachertube.  I saw that one of the other groups was looking at schooltube or something like that and it reminded me of the teachertube website.  I was first introduced to this website when one of my other professors showed us a video that she had uploaded to the site.  It was for music in the elementary classroom so she also showed us one other popular video on the site that used a rap to teach fractions or something like that. 
This site contains many different kinds of resources that teachers have created to share with other teachers.  There are videos, word documents, powerpoints, photos, and channels.  There was also something called teacher resources but the link was not working when I clicked on it.  It might have been because I did not sign in as a member of the site. 
This is a great site because teachers can use it to find some many great resources that already made.  For example you may want to find a more creative way to teach a subject to your class. Maybe a majority of the students in your class are really into music so you want to teach a topic they are struggling with by using a song or rap to help them remember it, but you dont feel like you can write one on your own.  This site would be a great place to look for something like  a song on a topic and much more. 

Rubistar

I don’t know how many people of have heard of rubistar before, but it’s an online tool that can be used to make rubrics for class projects.  I first learned about the tool in one of my other education classes, however, I didn’t really get a chance to check it out yet so I decided to look more in to the tool for this week’s class. 

From my experience with the tool this so far it seems to be really simple and easy to use.  You can either make your own rubric from scratch or you can choose a premade template based on the type of project you are assessing.  Some examples would be posters, lab reports, writing, oral presentations, art projects, and much more.  If you pick and already made rubric you still have a lot of choice in what goes into the rubric you pick the areas of which you wish to assess and then the tool gives you suggestions for how to asses each category.  If you don’t like the criteria or the amount of points that the tool suggests you can change it to what will work best for your class.    

I think this is a great to tool for first time teachers to know about.  It’s quick and easy to use.  After you pick all the criteria or type the information in yourself it creates the chart for you which is great because you don’t have to try and mess around in word or some other program trying to get everything to fit just right.  You could even have students create their own rubrics based on what they feel they should be assessed on.  This tools is also great because once you have a log in you can safe your created rubrics on the site as well.  For what I can tell this tool makes creating and using rubrics fast, simple and easy.  Using a rubric in general for assessing student work is also good for the students because everything is laid out and they now what is expected of them.  I also believe having students complete projects that can be assessed with something like a rubric is a much better way of assessing students knowledge than by using a test.      

Webquest.org

For this week Lisa and I are exploring the use of webquests in the classroom.  I first learned about webquests last week when I had to do complete a website review for my social studies in the elementary classroom class.  Webquest.org was one of the sites that my professor suggested that we looked into when completing our review.  While I was completing my review the different information that was available on these sites caught my eye and I wanted to learn more about it so that is why I choose to look more into webquests for this week. 

Webquests are basically online lessons designed by teachers for students to explore a topic more in depth on the internet on their own.  A webquest is set up so that it introduces a topic to the student, the student is then given a task to complete, and there are steps given to complete this task.  The teacher can also link word documents that they want the student to use and provides other web links for the students to explore. 

This great for the elementary classroom because children at this age don’t always have the skills they need to explore and research a topic on their own.  A webquest allows them to explore a topic but still have the freedom to look at different sites to gain the information needed like they would if they were doing research completely on their own.  I think webquests would be great to use during center time as a computer center or you could use webquests as an option to do when students finish other work early.

Even though here I mainly focused on how to use them in the elementary classroom webquests are created by teacher of all grades.  On the site you can search for what webquest that will work with a topic that you have in mind or create your own.  In a high school classroom you could even use these as an alternative homework assignment.  For more information about what makes a good webquest and to look at one looks like check out webquest.org.