Sunday, June 7, 2009

CEDO 520 Week #2

In week two, we were asked to research some resources such as Noodle Tools and Wikipedia. This assignment was right up my alley as I am very much entrenched in the battle of to use Wikipedia or not to Wikipedia as many of our teachers refuse to even listen to arguments about it, however, I believe it is a valuable starting point for educating students on what to research. In addition, I had been hearing about Noodle for some time but just hadn't gotten the time or the energy to really delve into learning about the tool until I was forced to do so for this class.

I found Noodle Tools to be every bit as awesome as I had been hearing and I believe this will rapidly replace Google as my primary search engine. In fact, I liked Noodle so much that for my end of the year engineering research paper that I require for my Principles students, I asked that each student make a gmail acct. (NOTE: if you have more than 15 students trying to create a gmail acct. from one IP address, Google will disallow as a means of protecting against false accts.). I then asked my students to logon to Noodle and begin searching the field of Engineering using the Clusty to get ideas for their presentations. Once the students determined a particular sub-category within the field of Engineering, the student was then asked to prepare a powerpoint presentation using Google and invite me and preferably all the other students as viewers so they could have access to the data and statistics at any given time.

As for the Wikipedia assignment, I found it very interesting to find that many of my classmates had similar beliefs as myself in that Wikipedia is a good source to begin researching from but not necessarily a final stop along the journey towards enlightenment. I also found it to be interesting that while going through this assignment, I actually had a student who had contacted the Webmaster for Wikipedia regarding the validity of their information so as to present this data to his English teachers for the purpose of helping them realize that the information is monitored closely. I informed this student of my current assignment and informed him of my beliefs and my findings and by combining his data along with my philosophy, he actually got one of our English teachers to agree to accept Wikipedia when combined with other resources verifying the data found from Wikipedia.

In all, this weeks of assignments were such that I could implement immediately and were every bit worthy of implementation. I enjoyed these assignments greatly and look forward to continued use of Noodle Tools and gaining a better understanding of it's nuances. In addition, I happy to have a furthered understanding of Wikipedia and will continue to allow it's inclusion in research for my classroom given the meeting of some basic criterium when using it.

1 comment:

  1. Ryan,

    I think you have found two winners for use in your classroom. Noodle tools are fantastic, especially for those students are new to the research process. And Clusty is a fantastic search engine. Although it doesn't have nearly the scope and size database as Google, the grouping function really streamlines the information gathering process.
    The Wikipedia debate certainly is an interesting study. I think you are correct by allowing to students to verify data against other sources to check for validity. Really, students should do this anyway during the research process. The problem obviously with Wikipedia lies not in the fact that anyone can post information as accurate, it is that people would believe this information without verification. Too often, students especially, will believe anything they view on the internet. I think it can be a good resource for the classroom, if nothing else but to show how to verify source material for accuracy.

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