Exploring and working
with sites involving highly interactive elements
Questions:
a Site name and URL
b. Why did you select this site?
c. How might the site help you with your major project?
d. What other uses might teachers have for this site?
e. How did you make use of this site?
f. What did you learn from your explorations?
g. To whom would you recommend this site, and for what purposes?
A. Site Name and URL: Bravenet Web Services: http://bravenet.com/
B. I chose this site because I thought it contained a number of incredibly useful features.
C. As currently conceived I do not think that I would deploy any of these features on my project. But, I could see a number of other project where these features would be useful.
D. The richness of this site allows for teachers to use many of its features. Linking pages, chats, voting pages, and countless other features make this a great way to increase the interactivity of any educational site.
E. I examined a number of the features on the site. All were well constructed, easy to deploy and very customizable. One could really not ask for much more from a site offering such web add-ons.
F. I would recommend it to any teacher constructing an educational site and seeking to increase the interactivity of the site. I think that students creating a school web site would find a number of the features useful.
A. Site Name and URL: Bigchalk: http://www.bigchalk.com
B. I began looking at this site somewhat skeptically. "Oh, another web
ed warehouse." But then I got looking "under the hood" and was
impressed by this site.
C. Again, as conceived, this site would not advance my final project. That doesn't
by any means make it a less than valuable educational resource.
D. There are hundreds of lessons and links to useful sites here. Bigchalk looks somewhat glossy and slick like some of those ed magazines that show up in your mailbox but are low on real content. But in the databases there are resources for all aspects of the K-12 community.
E. The lesson plans and the links to resources are those that I would exploit the most. One note though, in a brief examination of several topics a number of the resource links seem to be broken.
F. I think that I learned that the scope of this site is much bigger than my first impressions. It contains resources on a grand scope. Its organization is well conceived and easy to access.
G. I'd recommend this site to any teacher looking for lesson plan resources. It excels in this area. Also, it contains a vast number of "kid safe" resources. I maintain the best cyber filters are classroom teachers who are aware of good sites for children.