When will I ever use this?

New technology can turn humans into raccoons in a hurry. I remember being at my grandparents’ house in Indiana when I was young. The family was gathered around the television, and my grandpa was really enthused about his new remote control. No longer would he have to get up to change the channel. He and my dad were enthralled by a basic bit of technology that we now take completely for granted.

When starting this blog, I was enthused by all of the possibilities. As some of the novelty wore off, my enthusiasm dimmed. One of the keys to using a blog effectively in a class setting is making sure that there is an inherent usefulness to it, that it isn’t just using technology for the sake of using technology. My remote control is (embarrassingly enough) one of the most important appliances in my house. I use it every day, because it is inherently helpful. How will I make my blog a vital component of teaching my students?

The key to success will be having new content on a regular basis. The students must know that when they log on the blog will have new content. An eager student who checks back for new content becomes a little less eager each time he see the same old thing. The novelty of seeing one’s own writing wears off quickly; seeing responses to one’s writing and being able to continue the thread will bring students back.

I envision using my blog as a launching point for lesson introductions, lesson extensions, and differentiation for higher level students. For a unit on mythology, we talk about the virtues they society tries to encourage in its young citizens. To show that this is still done, I will post a comment mentioning how we extol and criticize athletes. Over the weekend, the students should watch at least part of a televised sporting event, and respond to the post with a specific example of praise or criticism for a specific trait or act. Similarly, the lesson could be extended by a challenge to come up with the most extreme example of praise or criticism over the course of a few weeks; extensions into other areas of public domain (politics, celebrity) would also work well. In short, posts to the blog can vary by student ability but can be used to introduce, continue, extend, and provide some closure to lessons. Since there is so much content behind the exciting new technology, I hope it will become as important to me as my treasured remote.

A Worthwhile Site

Wading through the plethora of educational sites available on the web can be a daunting task. Will the time spent looking for a valuable resource be rewarded by a trove of great ideas, literature, and activities? Or, will the end result be hours of frustration, and a reluctance to look online again? A quick search with Google Scholar linked me to ERIC.ed.gov, the acronym for which represents Education Resources Information Center.

What a find ERIC turned out to be! There are myriad searchable categories, as well as a search engine for the site. I tried “building vocabulary” and was rewarded with results for 60 scholarly articles and papers, for many of which ERIC has free full text availability. “Analytical thinking” yielded 558 results, 181 of which could be seen in full text for free. Obviously, analytical thinking is a very broad category. The search can be easily narrowed to focus on year, year range, type of publication, and extra keywords. This is a nice tool for the searcher who realizes that he doesn’t have time to wade through 181 articles, especially if some of them will touch his area of interest only tangentially.

The main benefit the site offers is an easy search for specific questions. The results that come back are from credible sources. Academic research findings and theory are quickly located for queries, and the ability to modify by time frame and article type steers searches to keep them closer to the originally intended target. The downside to ERIC is that it covers more of the theoretical than the practical realm. For a new teacher looking for lesson plans or even ideas for a given subject, it is absolutely not a valuable site. However, to find the basis and roots for certain practices it is quite valuable. The information available is credible, current, and precise; as such, ERIC is quite the valuable educational website.