Week 2

I feel as though my world is expanding at an exponential rate. I can't believe how much I learned (and didn't learn) about the internet today. I liked the activity we had to do as information overload would have made sorting through the material in a timely manner nearly impossible to put a paper together.

I tried using a few new search engines when I was looking into a tablet pc this week. I'm not impressed with the most of them. There really wasn't anything new or different about them. In the past I have defaulted to Google, sometimes using Yahoo! as a secondary search engine. Recently, I've been using ask.com because I needed more information than I was able to put into words. Asking a question straight out was about the only way I could put the words together. I was pleased to see that the search results led me into different directions. I actually found the most helpful information through ask.com.

Dogpile was a disappointment, however. My search results were primarily ads. I was looking for information to compare. Well, I still need to do the search engine assignment. Maybe I will gain new perspective.

I am intrigued by the word processing assignment. I am having problems getting all the pieces together to get my kids on Google Docs because they need an email address to use it. I'm hoping one of the other word processors will allow for less fuss. I was enlightened by Melissa when she brought up that most of her kids don't have access to MS Office. Not that Word is the only word processor out there, but the fact that most of her kids may not have similar word processing software is what piqued my interest. I wonder if online word processing may be a solution to that problem. It will be something I keep in mind as I explore the online word processors.

Chapters 3 and 4 in the text addressed student communication and critical thinking. The day after I read about how important communication was to learning, a parent had emailed me concerned about her son working in groups. She thought he talked too much and told him he was to work by himself unless I required him to be in a group. I was able to share with her what I had just read about learning and communication, lending more credibility to what I was telling her. I hope I had convinced her that focused, on task talking was better than learning in isolation.

I've spent quite a bit of professional time on the topic of critical thinking. One item of note, however, was the use of spreadsheets as a supporting tool for critical thinking. That would not have been something I would have come up with on my own, but once the idea was presented to me, it made immediate sense. I was pleased to see a practical use of spreadsheets for students. It will get them into the software, and ultimately playing around with it.