The focus of class this week was on fun web tools.  Web tools are a various range of websites that can be used to facilitate learning, ease planning, help with grading, and more.  While searching around the internet and experimenting with various web tools, I was able to find a few that are very useful.

The first web tool that I found important was paperrater.com.  This is a website that can be helpful for both students and teachers.  As an educator, teaching your students how to use this website could dramatically improve the quality of their work.  The website provides a grammar and spell check, as well as an option for writing suggestions.  All students have to do is submit their assignment to the website, and it will perform these functions for free.  For teachers, it offeres a plagiarism check, to ensure that students are creating their own work.  Often, when students are conducting research, they have a habit to "borrow" what other people say.  This website will help students avoid that.

Another useful website I found was digitalvaults.org.  This website is very useful in the content area of social studies.  This website has a vast archive of historical information and artifacts, very much like the archives at a local library.  By conducting research on this website, students can create short historical movies.

Freeinfosociety.com is one of the last websites I explored, but probably my favorite.  It is highly tied to the social studies content, and could be very useful in a history or government class.  The website contains a large supply of media, including historical speeches, e-books, and historical articles.  Students could use this website easily to conduct research for a class experiment.

The focus of this weeks class was visual learners.  Many students are visual (spatial) learners, which means they prefer using images, pictures, graphs, maps and colors  to attain information.  With so many educators  delivering with audio learning styles, these students are often left behind.  There are many tools to help visual learners.  While many may immediately think of using a Powerpoint or SmartBoard as the only way to help these students, websites such as Tagxedo.com and Wordle.com can be very helpful.

Even if a student is not a visual learner, visuals may help students gain interest in the subject area.  Students learn more when they have interest in the topic.  Making learning fun is very important.  Visuals can do that.  Visuals will catch a students attention from the beginning, and draw them in.

Inquiry based learning can be a very effective form or teaching.  It involves questions generated from the interests, curiosities, and perspectives/experiences of the learner.  When learning is based off of your own inquiries and questions, learning is more enjoyable.  When learning is enjoyable and fun, it is effective (making learning fun is a consistent theme throughout my blogs).

Inquiry based learning will also take a lot of pressure off of the teacher.  As an educator, there is a tremendous amount of planning always involved.  This is especially true in the old school, boring, monotonous methods of direct teacher based instruction.  Preparing lecture for every day requires lots of work, and can be physically exhausting.  It will also bore your students to death.  Teachers should consider giving their students guidelines for research and class, and holding class discussions.  Students should play a significant part in their own learning, with the teacher being present for guidance, assistance, and to facilitate discussion.  

Using podcasts can be very effective for your classroom.  First off, there are tons of educational podcasts that can be used for the classroom.  I was unable to post a podcast within this blog, due to the limited technology of my ancient computer.  Regardless, students should be familiar with how to use and create podcasts.  Podcasts can be used in place of class presentations.  Many students are terrified to speak in front of people.  Having them create podcast could ease this fear.  Podcasts can also be used as prep for substitute teachers, engaging with parents, helping absent students, and making school announcements.   Thousands of free podcasts can be found here