Wrapping it up

I really learned a lot from this class. Technology is taking over our nation and I need to catch up! I really liked all the researching assignments we did because I learned a lot of new methods for searching the internet that I have now used in other classes! I am glad I decided to take this elective because I know it is going to benefit me a lot in the future!

Last assignment

Well the final week has gotten here and I really liked the idea of having us comment on each other's pages rather than doing a presentation. For one, we already had somewhat of an idea of our classmates topics and having us comment on the pages really meant we had to look through each others pages. For myself, I love being able to get feedback from other people to give me ideas I did not really think about. I also am not a student who gets excited about having to do presentations because I just do not really like talking in front of others; therefore, I loved the alternate assignment. I commented on John and Matt's web pages because I am also interested in the topic they chose. John's website could someday be useful to me because I am hoping to be a coach someday! I also commented on the parts of speech site and thought she did a great job with it!

Working on the Web Page

This week we worked on creating different subtopics for our page. I decided to split the topics up the same way I had done for the google bookmarks and placed the same internet sources I had previously found. I think this makes it very easy to navigate through our page and you can go straight to exactly what it is you are looking for. Now that I have gotten a hang of using this google websites thing it has become much simpler to create and design new pages. I ran into some troulble formatting my pages and trying to get a picture in there, but for the most part I think it turned out good! I really hope this site is something that will benefit students and teach them more about HPV!

WebQuest Creating!

This week we created a WebQuest activity to go on our web page involving our topic. I really enjoyed doing this activity because coming from a health and physical education undergrad I got to use my imagination and try to be creative. I choose to do a WebQuest because my activity would probably be centered around a middle to high school level so I wanted to go ahead and provide them with some resources. I also wanted to do an activity which got the students working together and learning the information in a manner in which they could teach their classmates. This was always a way I learned best at that age level so I figured it would be a good idea!

Fair Use

This week we completed an assignment which we had to determine whether or not using imformation for a web page would be considered fair use or not. This assigment and the checklist really helped to determine if something was in fair use and permitted to be used without permission. The assignment also forced us to read our classmates responses in order to see others views and respond to them. I think I am going to keep this checklist handy when doing other assignments which requires the use of information that is not my own knowledge.

We also had to come up with four scenarios that were either in fair use or violated it. We had determine whether it was fair use and tell why are why not it would fall under that category. This really helped me with figuring out how to determine whether or not different things would fall under fair use.

Big6

This week we worked on seaching the Big6 activity board for a lesson to critique. The first one I found was a project I have actually participated in before with elementary school students called Flat Stanley. This project gave lots of good information and complied with the Big6. There really were no activities which went along with my topic, HPV, so I choose a second one dealing with alternative fuel and shopping for cars. I even found this to be an interesting activity and think it would have been fun to do while I was in high school. Overall this assignment was just another thing to get me searching the web and better at working with computers. Hopefully learning about the Big6 will help me create to a good activity for my topic.

Creating a Page

This week we began the creation of our web page. I have never created my own web page before so it was neat to learn and figure out how to create my own. It was difficult for me to find a picture because a lot of the photos dealing with HPV were not really appropritae. I thought about using one to make it a reality but because I am including middle school students in my age group I decided to hold off. I think by splitting it up and doing the web site piece by piece will help to create a better page.

Evaluating Week

This week we evaluated some of our web pages we will be using for our projects. I picked two of the web sites that I felt had some of my most useful information so I could check to see the value of the web page. Both of the sites I checked seemed to have very reliable sources and authors of the articles. One of my authors was a PhD and the other came from the CDC. Both of my articles seemed to be useful and appropriate for my topic. This assignment was helpful to be able to figure out ways to check and see if web sites are of any worth or not.

Web-Page

This week we had to put all of websites and Google Bookmarks into a web page. This assignment is going to benefit me a lot for my presentation because it helped me to group my topics together. The best part about this assignment is having those categories to split your sites into. I know that when I am looking for more information on the signs and symptoms I can refer to that page and it will take me directly to what I am looking for. All of these assignments using different methods of technology are so interesting to me and very useful because I have never used computers in this way before. When I would research something in the past, I would go to a link and print it out and go from there. I really think for future projects I will be able to use a web page design like the one we did to help gather all of my resources.

LIVE CLASSROOM!

This was my first experience ever giving a presentation on-line and I have to say I enjoyed it! It was really interesting how the whole live classroom thing worked and it is actually really useful. It was great to be able to sit at my desk and much easier to talk to my computer rather than a group of people. John, who was the first classmate to go, I felt did an awesome job. He really did a good job of setting the tone for the presentations and was very informative. For me, his presentation was useful because I am interested in being a coach and his search methods gave me ideas for places to look into. I also felt Erin also did a great job differentiating between her searches and how she went about narrowing her search that will help me with my topic. All in all I felt everyone in our group was really supportive of each other and did very well. I think this assignment helped to bring some of us together and get to know each other better.

More Ways!

I thought over these past couple of weeks we had pretty much covered all the different ways to search topics on the internet, but I guess not! This week I decided to look up a new topic because I really could not find anything new to look up on HPV. Using the GEM database I decided to look up information on HIV which of course had a lot of different stuff. Using the GALILEO engine I thought it would be cool to seach something involving health that related to me which was women and sports. I got some really good stuff from this method of searching also.

Internet Databases

During this week, I really learned how to enhance my methods for searching information on the internet. I really had no idea there were this many different ways to search for the same topic on the internet. I discovered different search engines that seemed to really work for me and others that were not as successful. My favorite and most useful were probably the Google and YAHOO sites and really the ERIC database was pretty helpful. I didn’t really enjoy using the Library Index as much, but it was still neat to experiment with because I have never used it before. Thanks to all this searching though I pretty much have found all the information I am going to need on HPV.

Google Bookmarks

During this week's assignment, I learned how to use Google Bookmarks. I have never used anything like this before and I have found that it makes looking back at needed websites much easier. I like that we can get to Google bookmarks from any computer and retrieve any of our websites at any time. I believe that this is going to be a very useful tool with many of our assignments and papers throughout this program, so I am excited about learning how to use it.