November 2006 — News/In Brief
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Technology + Online + Industry + Partnerships
:: Online Learning
QUESTIA SURVEY REVEALS TEACHERS’ MISTRUST IN WEB SOURCES. Questia, an online educational research resource, has released the results of its nationwide online survey of secondary school educators. The report reveals the anxiety teachers feel over the presence of unreliable information on the web, and their students’ susceptibility to it. They doubt kids’ ability to discern good information from bad.
The great majority (95 percent) of respondents encourage their students to use the web for research, but they have difficulty directing kids to web content that is current, reliable, and safe. Nearly eight in 10 teachers are concerned about their students’ use of inaccurate information. Additionally, more than half said student cheating and plagiarism—an outgrowth of doing online research—also concerns them.
DOWNLOAD PODCASTS
FOR FREE. The National Geographic
Society and National
Geographic magazine are offering
free downloadable audio
and video files. Students
and teachers can experience
an African safari, catch the
week’s top science and nature
news stories, and listen to interviews
and songs from music stars around
the world.
The podcasts are also available through Apple’s iTunes and Yahoo!. The free offerings include “National Geographic News,” “Afropop Worldwide,” and Traveler Magazine’s “50 Walks of a Lifetime.” Each podcast is focused on specific geographic or cultural areas National Geographic has covered in its 118 years of publication.
Connect and Join With Those Far Away A new online portal brings separated families together. Connect and Join, a family support and education services publishing company, has created a new, secure online communications portal designed to keep family members connected whenever professional circumstances or commitments— such as military deployment or business trips—cause them to be separated. The subscription-based website community allows users to interact privately with one another. The site also meets federal Operational Security Guidelines.
Connect and Join’s site was designed to foster project-based learning, that is, learning by doing; studies indicate that PBL helps students with lesson retention. Users can hone their technology skills by messaging and calendaring, online scrapbooking, and event archiving, as well as completing computer-based arts and crafts projects.
Using materials provided on the Connect and Join site, families can build their own web pages. Each registration allows five users, with a family editor to oversee all content, including photos and other scanned images. Connect and Join’s version 2 release will contain an area for children to keep a “Days While You Were Away” journal, as well as an option to share books they are reading and artwork with the parent who is away. The portal also has a section for teens.
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