Edutopia, a PLC

Teachers love to share ideas with other teachers, including lesson plans, research findings, professional resources, test questions, performance assessments, and rubrics. So it was only natural with the birth of the information age and boom of the Internet, that teachers would form online learning communities. In the education world, these websites are known as Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). They generally require sign-in memberships to access articles, lesson ideas, and other sources.

One PLC that I came across and have spent a lot of time on is Edutopia. What makes Edutopia an exemplary online community is the site contains information for both professional development and practical-daily advice for educators.Edutopia's horizontal navigation bar cleanly organizes the website so your average person can easily find the desirable information. Horizontal navigation tabs include browse by grade level, videos, schools that work, classroom guides, community, core strategies, and blogs. The blogs on Edutopia are targeted toward specific topics such as new teachers, education reform, neuro-logical learning and educational equity. The blogs and articles on the PLC were of particular interest to me and I think this is definitely a website that I will use in the future as a professional educator. 

A Web-Quest Review - "The Memory of the French Revolution"

The Memory of the French Revolution

     For this new blog post, I thought I would review a Social Studies Webquest. Well, first of all, what's a webquest? A webquest is essentially an inquiry-based project that takes students through a specific set of (generally) web-based information on a particular topic. Students are generally asked to create a product after completing the webquest and use the Internet to research, gather, and assess information. Webquests are a great tool to help teach students information literacy, research, critical thinking, and writing skills. Students usually work in groups or individually depending on the quest.
      While I was out searching webquests, I came upon one on the French Revolution. The quest, The Memory of the French Revolution, created by Brittany Bryant, asks students to explore key ideas of the French Revolution and create a tourist information guide. But the reason I picked this webquest to review/blog about is because I think it takes an unique approach to the French Revolution. Ms. Bryant asks students to not only learn about the revolution but also to examine the some of the symbols used during the revolution and assess how they are still relevant to French culture and used today. Her main example is Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People painting was used as Coldplay's album cover for "Viva LaVida".
    For this particular webquest, Ms. Bryant provides the students with template to help organize their thoughts and information they learn during their webquest. She also provides an explanatory rubric so students (and the teacher) can better see how they will grade/be graded on the assignment. I think that webquests can be an extremely useful tool for teachers because the information is already provided for, but this is also a potential setback because the teacher will have to thoroughly examine the webquest to make sure it is suitable for his/her students and learning goals.

An "I use Wikipedia" Confession: Thoughts on Using the Technology in the Classroom

Ok. I'll be honest with the world today, I am going to make a confession.  I am a grad student studying to be a teacher, I majored in history and I use Wikipedia. *Gasp* There! I said it, "I use wikipedia." Let's face it, we all do, even our professors with fancy letters after their names (doctoral degrees) Wikipedia is often the first (or second) site that pops up when we google just about anything. I will admit that when I come across an topic that I don't know or need to get the "gist" of, I use wikipedia. It is a great site for the basics, to give you a general idea of a topic. But it is not, however, a proper source when researching a paper and should not be cited by students.

A recent article in Education World called, To Use or Not to Use: Wikipedia in the Classroom, addresses some of the questions, educators face about how(or even if) teachers should treat wikipedia in the classroom. Tomaszewski, an associate editor at Education World, notes that increasingly teachers are using Wikipedia as a tool to teach online literacy and proper research techniques. As a future history teacher, the article immediately caught my eye. Research is one of those skills that is extremely important in history but also for life skills. Tomaszewski sets down a couple of ground rules including, "Don't cite wikipedia," a rule even suggested by Wikipedia editors for educational use; "Don't use Wikipedia Simply Because its First;" and "Know your Source" What Tomaszewski means is, you need to go the extra mile and actually read the endnotes on the wikipage and track down those sources. It is those sources and the sources, your source uses that are more apt to be reliable - though you should carefully examine each source and judge its reliability. Tomaszewski concludes the article with an idea for a classroom activity to build information literacy skills online through examining wikipedia articles. 


As a future social studies teacher, I think I (and other teachers too) need to recognize the fact that my students are going to read the wikipedia article even if I say not to. Because of this, I might as well teach them how to examine the site carefully and take everything they read with a grain of salt. If I transform Wikipedia from strictly speaking of the open-source website as evil and not to be used, to a site that can be looked at for basic, broad reading with reservations, my students will appreciate and learn a skill that is much more valuable in this technology, information-heavy age. Online literacy is a skill that educators need to teach to students, including a proper use of Wikipedia sites.



Tomaszewski, J. (2012). To use or not to use: wikipedia in the classroom. Education World. www. educationworld.com.

An Evolution in Textbooks to the Digital Age

I recently read the article, Seven things you should know about the evolution of the textbook, (2012) from EDUCAUSE, which is a free-online resource that promotes the intelligent use of technology in classrooms. EDUCAUSE produces quick reading articles on various pieces of new technologies and how they might impact classroom learning. I chose the article on the evolution in textbooks because it is something that we all grew up with, and is an essential resource of information in the classroom. 

Online textbooks (before the evolution of tablet technology) were generally seen as "supplementary" to the "real-deal" hard-bound textbook. Textbook companies used the same process as they would for a traditional textbook publishing. But as the article describes, the recent boom in tablet technology (such as the iPad, Galaxy Tablet, and Kindle Fire) has the potential to greatly change the way students interact with textbooks and how teachers use texts in the classroom. Online textbooks are often referred to as "smartbooks" or "interactive books" by their publishing companies because they offer a plethora of (the same) information in multiple formats (such as audio, video, gaming, etc). This can allow the teacher to either pick from a variety of platforms to present information to the class but also to differentiate students according to how they best receive information. 

The article highlights one program that could drastically change the face of textbooks, the iBooks Author program developed by Apple. This is a program that would allow people to self-publish books directly to the iPad through Apple's iBook program. Currently, various universities such as Boston College, are looking at this program to expand their faculty's publishing capabilities. In the secondary education classroom, the iBooks Author program has both positive and negative outcomes. For the positive, this means that school districts, schools (divided by content area) or even individual teachers can write a textbook that fits their particular needs. But it also has the potential to unleash a vast number of "textbooks" that have not been properly researched, written and edited for a proper audience. My caution with the iBooks Author program would be to carefully research the author/s of the textbook (make sure they have credibility) and take time to sift through and read portions of the book to check for student accessibility, reading level, content accuracy, organization and appeal of the interactive book. 

These new generation of online, interactive textbooks have the potential to fundamentally altar what a textbook is and how students view and interact with information. They are portable and can be assessed anywhere (provided the school has enough tablets for its practical use everyday). They also greatly expand the content delivery potential for students who are visual learners or who struggle in reading. But these online textbooks also have a downside, mainly, the nature of new technology; the kinks are still being worked out and can only be resolved through experimentation with the product. These textbooks are also large files and may fail to download if on a low-bandwidth connection. It will also have implications for copyright law and how to cite these new resources.

Despite these downsides, the "smartbooks" promote interactive learning and student engagement with information in new and exciting ways.

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-evolution-textbook