Snow day discovery

Today was a very rare thing in NYC - a snow day. I decided to stay in and check out some of the websites and programs that were mentioned in this weeks readings.

I first checked all the wikipedias. Overall the concept of wikipedia makes me uneasy since anyone can write anything that they want whether accurate or not. That being said, I found that they had interesting material.

Wikibooks had books on some interesting topics. I read a one on classroom management and notetaking. There are definitely interesting ideas there.

Next I looked at wikitravel. This one I could see referring back to in my personal life. The one problem that I found was that it had so many links that I ended up so far off from where I started. If I had no goal, this would be fine. But, I was looking to specifically find information about Hawaiian travel. Eventually I made it back there but it took a long time since there were many interesting things to read. Basically, the reader needs to keep very focused when reading this site.

World 66 was alright. I found that it had less information that wikitravel and it felt like it was trying to sell me something the entire time.

Wikijunior made me the most nervous out of all of them. These books are written for children who, for the most part, believe everything they read. I tried to open a page for editing hoping that it would ask me to sign up, screen me, or something. It did none of this. It just allowed me to begin editing. I could have written anything and some child somewhere could have read it. This is not a site that I would recommend for my 9 and 10 year old students.

I then looked at wikisource. This seems less like a wikipage than a website. It seems like there is limited revision allowed. I like the idea of that when it is supposed to be a copy of actual text.

Bob Sprankle's work was very interesting. I'd love to do some blogging work with my students. Maybe pair them up with an old student of mine that's in high school so they have someone that is reading it often. The one thing that may not allow me to do this is the amount of children in a typical NYC class. I typically have 28-32 children in my class. And it's only me. The computer work, in my mind, would be better if it was a smaller class with at least 2 adults. It looks like Bob has 13 children which seems like a more manageable number for this type of work. His children did produce beautiful work though.

Global Schoolnet Foundation was out of order. I'll have to check back with that one another time.

Next I looked at Tapped In. I love that it tracks you. This makes me feel that people that don't want to be tracked will stay away. This makes it feel safer to me for my students, as well as for me.