4 - Online games and horrible math teachers

• SC.4.L.17.4 (The Big idea is interdependence. This focuses on the interaction between plants, animals, and humans interact. This also delves into how we depend on one another and our environment. Human impacts on the environment are included as well as how energy flows from the sun, to producers, to consumers)
• Concept-mapping
• The use of concept-maps are especially useful for the material included within this standard. The transfer of energy throughout all parts of the ecosystem can easily be tranlated into a concept-map with sites such as inspiration.com.
• I also intend to use educational games as well. An example of a game I would use for this standard specifically is http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/games/producersconsumersgame.swf. Similar games can be found here.

I feel that using the internet to support student research is essential. This is especially the case with younger students, who are in need of more visual and interactive material in order to retain information in class. Through online tools such as interactive online games, the process of reinforcing information learned in the classroom can migrate from being a chore to an activity that could potentially be deemed fun. Due to the fact that I intend on teaching fourth grade students, it would be a major concern of mine to ensure that the course material is, at the very least, reinforced through online research tools. Because of the age group of my future students, some methods of online research will not be useful. For example, simply providing my students with a sheet of paper with a list of questions and telling them to look up various text-heavy websites in order to gather information will be highly ineffective. I feel that internet research is most effective with younger students when the webpages are highly interactive or collaborative. Otherwise, in my opinion, it would be a waste of time.

Open education has directly impacted how I have searched for internet-based resources in the past. I distinctly remember having a terrible math teacher my junior year of high school, and more often than not I would find myself being next to clueless the weekend before the tests. If it were not for open education, I would not have been able to search for videos of teachers teaching calculus on youtube. This has been essential to me for a good part of a year, and I'm sure it has benefitted tons of other people too.

During the web hunt I became better-able to narrow my search with specific keywords. The search tools I became most comfortable with are quotation marks, the minus symbol, and the word 'and'.

My webhunt:

Search for an online game that can effectively reinforce a subject (your choosing) for your students in a fun and engaging way.

Search for a software that will enable students to collaborate and form a short movie or animation that teaches a concept.