Chapter #6 Teaching with Education Websites and other Online Resources

Chapter #6 - Teaching with Education Websites and other Online Resources

Focus Question 6:  How might education websites provide interactive and engaging learning experiences for students?

• Educational websites provide opportunities for students to explore their own questions or go through a site in a nonlinear, self-directed manner.
• Educational websites allow students to engage with online material through stories, characters, mysteries, and controversial issues.

Student engagement - traditional teaching and learning is transmissive: it focuses on communicating a great dial of information (or content) to students.  Today's students, with very different characteristics.  They do not usually learn as effectively by simple listening passively, note-taking and absorbing information.  They learn better if they are engaged.  This means moving away from didactic content delivery and increasing interaction.

Engaging students online, consider students' access to computing facilities, and to high speed Internet.  While the vast majority of students have good access, there are still many students who may not have good access off-schools.

Again, students abilities are improving as Internet related activieties increase in every day life.  However, some students will need assistance and consideration in these matters.

Tech Tool 6.2:   Delicious

Free online.  Users are required to register.  Delicious is a Web-based social bookmarking tool that organizes all of your bookmarks in one place.  While using delicious, you can view a Web page and capture the page by clicking on a Delicious tab in your toolbar.


 

Conclusion
 

Very few of us attend regular lectures these days; most information comes to us electronically, and includes graphics, etc.  We unlikely to be accustomed to sitting for long periods simply listening to someone talk. Web tools led us to focus and giving students access to information (lecture notes online, for example) made it easier to get students doing-interacting with resources and with peers through chat and discussion. I think the educational websites and other online resources are being used increasingly by educators to enable a greater level of interaction and collaboration among students.

Resources:
Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2010). Transforming
teaching with new technologies. Allyn & Bacon