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[|Importance of Technology in the Classroom]
I am an administrator at a school in which we have a great teaching staff, however they do show resistance to increasing their use of technology in the classroom. Most of the teachers do the bare minimum of checking email, submitting grades and attendance online, and attending an occasional technology workshop. However, very few of the teachers use technology daily and effectively in their classrooms.

The website that I found for my assignment was published by the North Central Education Laboratory. This is a very informative site that addresses the importance of technology in today’s classrooms. Several of the topics they discuss include: the issue of technology, No Child Left Behind, research results, factors to consider, action options, implementation and more. They also include who they are, the date posted, date updated and an email address to reach them. The most beneficial information from this site may come from the web addresses of all of the contributing sources. Each of these websites are full of useful information’s to today's classrooms, and are good resources for numerous topics.

The content is excellent, appropriate and authentic. However the navigation and design could be improved greatly. The information is up-to-date and relevant to today's classrooms, however, it is presented within a single webpage with very little appeal. There is no background color or interesting pictures. It would be much more user friendly if the information was published on separated webpage’s with more examples of each topic. It gets confusing, even frustrating scrolling through that much information all clumped together.

I can’t imagine many of the teachers on my campus sitting at their computer reading through the information in that format, and being able to understand it. It would definitely have to be more user-friendly for a lot of them. They, like many of the students, would get either bored or frustrated, and go onto the next thing. Posted by Kevin Jones at [|3:29 PM]   [|0 comments]

[|November Learning Assignment]
I looked at the information on November learning. The information about How To Read A Web Address is information that I was already aware of, but would be a good website to teach students. Our students need to be able to decipher what information is relevant, and what information is just propaganda or worst.

The information on the Find the Publisher page was very useful. I like the easywhois website that they recommend. You can look up publishers and IP addresses. Many people need to know that when they visit a website, or post on a forum, that people can see there IP address, and can easily find their location.

There is a local sports message board, SETXSPORTS.COM, that many people get on and post anonymously. However, many of them don't realize that the administrators of the board see their IP addresses, and look up who they are and where they live. The head coach of Hamshire Fannett is a constant poster on the site, pretending to be a fan, he doesn't realize that even though he changes screen names, his IP address stays the same, so everybody knows it's him. It will probably end up costing him his job.

Google Custom Search This is something that I am going to make sure every teacher on our staff knows how to use. I am also going to use this on our new Middle School website that I will be developing over the summer. This would be a great way for teachers to guide their students learning. I am going to help each of our departments in our school come up with a list of websites that are relevant to their subject area, and include the search engine on our webpage.

I am definitly going to take some time playing around with the Google Custom Search to find all the ways we can use it at school.

I started my custom search for TAKS material. This is a google search that I will spend hours on making easy to use this summer. I would like for the students or parents to be able to type in any subject and have a list of useful resources to help.

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I do appreciate the things I've been learning in this class with the projects and readings, I will defininitly attempt to incorporate all of them in our website this summer, and hopefully that will set a good example for our teachers, and they will incorporate them into their curriculum.