MILP Presentation

Humboldt Sr. High offers teachers 1/2 hour staff development sessions once a month during our lunch hour. The Humboldt MILP Crew, Marilyn, Carmen, Matt and I presented to our staff about the best of the best of MILP. I spoke about the 3 R's. I wanted to talk about Del.icio.us as well, but we ran out of time. It was such a nice experience to share information about MILP with our colleagues and I hope that some of them join the project next year.

Topics shared:
3 R's
Research Process
Level 4 questions
RPC

Thing 12: Search Engines

For some reason I always use Google as my search engine of choice. I'm not quite sure, maybe it's because Google is so clutter-free. Yahoo and ask have a lot more going on on their pages. Hmmmm....here's the test: Ask vs. Google.....

Interesting! Ask has this lovely page with images, news, encyclopedia entries and dictionary definitions right there for you! This is different than Google, where you have to add an extra "click" to get to these things. I think that it's time for me to use more ask.com!

Thing 11: GOOGLE

I love Google. I love Gmail, I love Blogger, I love Reader, I use the search, I appreciate the little artwork on special days, I think Google Earth is absolutely amazing, I have begun to use Google Scholar with my students, and I love Marilyn's photos on Picasa. Before MILP I had no idea of how useful, versatile, and PROFESSIONAL Google truly is. Blogger, Reader, and Scholar were all new to me. My students are also learning more about the usefulness of google (and that "google" is NOT a "source"!)

Thing 10: Copyright and Plagiarism

Oh wow, it sure is hard to keep on top of plagiarism with the students. I mean, it is pretty easy to spot, but it is hard to explain and to direct them towards responsible use. My students do a few research projects in my class and this is the ongoing struggle. It becomes especially difficult with students with learning disabilities or low reading levels and writing skills. I could spend weeks on lessons about how to write information "in your own words" and how to create work based off of information learned from several different sources.

I'm still plugging away, however! Any advice on this subject would be welcomed!

del.icio.us!!!

I am now a new del.icio.us user and it is fabulous! What a great tool. When I first heard about it I didn't see its value. However, as a social studies teacher, there are so many websites out there to use and del.icio.us is a tool to help me not only tag and remember these sites but to organize them as well. The only thing that I want to do now it install the tools onto my other computer, too. Yay for del.icio.us!

Reliable Resources

I have been talking to my students a lot about reliable resources. They are gaining an understanding of what those mean and most of them chime in when I say "We need to make sure that are sources are what??? Reliable!" I also developed a "Source Sheet" where they keep track of their sources and include bibliographical info, an annotation, and an explanation of WHY they think that the source is reliable. Examples: the domain is .edu. It was on an online learning resource database.

Online Learning Resources

Last Tuesday Marilyn, our Library Media Specialist, team taught with me. She helped my class discover how to use the online card catalog and the online learning resources. It was a great experience! The students are working on a History Day project. The OLR's will help them to find reliable resources and primary documents, two of the cornerstone for History Day! Awesome!

Also, the students now have the website, connect.spps.org memorized! Yay!