Sorry that this post is a little late...I've been trying to keep a regular schedule of posting on Saturdays or Sundays, but that didn't work out this weekend.
Last week in COMP 204, we began to discuss the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). Though they are colloquially held to be synonymous, we learned the distinct differences between the two in class. The Internet is the massive network of networks that powers tools such as the WWW, email, and file transfers all over the world. The WWW is just an application of the Internet that allows its users to navigate through web pages via hyperlinks and view information in a multimedia format. Besides technical terms, there was not much to be learned about the Internet and WWW for our class--we have all been using them since elementary school for classes and entertainment, so we know our way around.
We did, however, broaden our viewpoints on the Web and the Net by examining them from a future educator's viewpoint. For example, the Internet is an extremely useful tool when it comes to connecting a school district (we have a campus network that demonstrates this idea to us daily) because administrators, teachers, and students can all access software, hardware, and other data necessary for the learning process. Whether the information is handouts explaining projects, a worksheet to be filled out and submitted via the network, or a district-wide bulletin to inform parents of news in the schools, the network provides ease of access to all. The benefits of the Web are clear, especially in this day and age, when students respond so well to technology and use it so often in their daily lives. Online learning can take place in the form of Web scavenger hunt or research project using various websites. I recently read an article that dealt with my discipline specifically: it detailed a study conducted with ESL students that used hypermedia to learn new vocabulary and showed significant increases in learning and retention of the words that they researched themselves using the Web.
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Look into Course Management Systems such as Moodle or Blackboard to see even more ways to integrate the internet into the classroom--applications for ESL or Spanish classrooms are (and I'm just brainstorming here) English-only (or Spanish-only for the Spanish classroom) chat rooms, online paper submission, online quizzes and tests, collaboration forums, language-specific journaling, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few sites that offer free Moodle sites to instructors, and many schools have some sort of CMS available for teachers to use.
The internet's a cool resource--but it's dangerous, because it can be overused to the extent to which your students are learning more from the computer than they are from you!