Ask Jeeves
www.askjeeves.com is the first web site I evaluated. This is a search engine that the librarian in my building uses with students. She finds this very useful with the elementary students. So I decided to explore the site to see how it works.
Ask Jeeves is a search engine that allows students to type in a question and then it comes up with a series of questions that the student then picks the one closest to their own. Once the student chooses one of the questions closest to theirs and clicks on ask it then goes to a web site with information to answer that question.
I can see how this would be a great way to have younger students search on the Internet. It is a safe way for them to explore and allows them to ask a question and get results. I tested this search engine with a couple of younger student questions and it was great how accurate and well developed this web site worked.
Hyperstudio
This is a multimedia program that allows students to create multimedia slide shows. It is similar to Microsoft PowerPoint but this program has so many more features. It allows the students to put in text, graphics, sound files, video files, animation, and so much more.
My school has this program so I worked with it for a few days to see how to make a presentation and what I could add. It was great and so simple to figure out. I am planning to use it with my Jr. High students to create history projects for World War II.
Hyperstudio has a web site www.hyperstudio.com that has a demo you can download. It also has projects that are displayed, an update library, resource center, and tech. Support. My school received a copy of hyperstudio’s site central, which allows the user to create a web page that will allow the viewing of hyperstudio stacks over the Internet.
Sony Mavica Digital Camera
I just purchased a Sony Mavica camera for my school to replace an Apple quicktake camera we used with the Power Macintosh lab. I went with the Sony because of the ease of use and the features. The Sony saves the pictures on regular 3.5 disks, so all the student or inexperienced teacher needs to do is take the disk and put it in their computer and pull up the pictures. How much easier could it be, no more hooking up the camera to the computer, no saving on expensive specialty media disks, this way everyone can save on their own disk very inexpensively.
The camera has a 10 times zoom, it has and LCD
panel so you can see the exact picture before you take it. It has multi
screen mode that allows you to take 9 pictures in 2 seconds and even plays
them back for you. Automatic flash is included or you can have it off or
constantly on. It has so many features that I can’t wait to have my students
use it for their web page projects. For more information go to: http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/products/imaging/mvcfd71.html#features
Microsoft Education
http://www.microsoft.com/education/k12/classroom/
This web site is produced by Microsoft, which I know a lot of people have opinions about but their web sites for education are really improving. I have been receiving their weekly updates by e-mail for a year now and this fall’s pages are better than ever. I teach using several Microsoft Products: Works, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. This website has lesson plans listed by grade levels using each individual product that they sell. I really like this site for quick resources and as a starter for new teachers to gain ideas to use in the computer lab. The down side to this site is that it is only for Microsoft products and would take a lot of work to convert a project over to a different company’s similar software.
Netscape Composer Tutorial
http://illinois.online.uillinois.edu/Presentations/composer/NetscapePC/
I reviewed this web page created by the University of Illinois as a tutorial for using Netscape Composer. The page is well designed with out a lot of the fancy distractions, that draw away students attention from the main subject.
I evaluated this to see if this web page would be useful when I do my major project with my students on creating web pages using Composer.
I found this page to be very well formatted and
the links easy to understand and use. Each section that it demonstrates
is easy to understand from the text or if the student is a visual learner
it has wonderful pictures demonstrating what menu commands and options
to use. I feel most of my Jr. High students would be able to use this tutorial
as a reference when they are working on their projects. The only future
problem I could see with this site is when Composer makes a drastic change
in its menus or commands. Then the site would need to be updated to match.