Week 8

In the article, Evaluating the Importance of Common Components in School-Based Websites: Frequently of Appearance and Stakeholders’ Judges Value was an interesting study. Only eight of the seventy schools that were included in the study incorporated more than 50% of the recommended features in their site. I found this to be a very interesting statistic because it shows me that schools are not going out of their way to improve their site. The study also indicates that parents and students appear to disagree about specific types of data that are useful in a website. It is very common for parents and students to disagree. For example parents and students disagree on types of TV shows that students should not watch or video games that students should not be playing. Therefore, I do not find this statement to be out of the ordinary.

In the article, Using Websites Wisely consisted of ways to assist teachers to help students work online in a meaningful way. I found the article to be very helpful when assigning online work to students. The article also lists websites to use to help students learn. Overall, I feel this article had a lot of useful knowledge.

In the article, Making the Most of Your Class Website consisted of different types of websites you can use depending on your purpose for the classroom website. I never realized that there were different types of websites teachers could set up. I found this article to be very useful because I do plan on setting up a classroom website when I become a teacher. The article assisted me with determining the purpose of my classroom website. As well as to take into consideration that all students have sufficient access to the Internet and are computer savvy to do web based work. Overall, I feel this article will be useful to me when setting up my classroom website.

In the article, Elementary Classroom Web Sites: Support For Literacy Within and Beyond the Classroom consisted of a study based on how elementary classroom Web sites support children’s literacy. I found the Literature-Based Approach section to be very interesting. This approach was the least supported instructional approach, with 35% of Web sites included a feature regarding children’s literature. Only 32% of Web sites featured a link to children’s book authors. I find this to be very interesting because in literature book authors are very important as well as the instructional approach. Therefore, I found this article to be very knowledgeable regarding classroom Web sites.