I’m planning on doing a webquest like lesson on Monday, so I’ve been poking around the internet to see how other people have been using technology in their classrooms.

I found an article at A History Teacher with a cool tip.  Apparently you can use a Google service to create a custom search engine for your students to use.  You can hand select what sites are included in the index, and then students can use it as if it were plain old Google.  This would probably help keep them on track, and I might look into using this later in the year.

Another trick, which I learned at the inservice and which I’m planning on using Monday, is to create a del.icio.us list for the class.  At the moment, I’ve only added links for the one lesson, but I hope to expand it as the year goes on.  Like the custom Google search index, the del.icio.us list is intended to focus the students’ research efforts on a few pages.  They can navigate through the list using the tags, choose what is relevant to their topic, and not have to wade through too much irrelevant info.

If you’ve never used del.icio.us before, it’s simple.  Go to the main site - http://del.icio.us, register an account, and it will walk you through the quick process of adding links to your bookmark list.  You can check out the basic list I set up at http://del.icio.us/mrrockus.

Now if only I had a full complement of computers, this technology would be a bit more useful…

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Resources, Internet, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.