Rollyo, Glogster and Delicious...oh my...

I have to be honest, playing around on Rollyo and Glogster was frustrating. I tried making a Rollyo account and I was frustrated. I like Google as a search engine and I just wasn't truly understanding why I would want to use a site like Rollyo. I wasn't happy with the search engine I created, so I just gave up that week.

After reading Elaine's post, I can see the value in using the site to be sure students are pointed in the right direction for finding reputable information. However, after some reflecting, I question whether or not we would be doing a disservice to our students. Part of the education of the 21st Century has to be helping our students to understand how to evaluate what they are reading on the internet. So, in some situations, I think this site may be useful, but we also need to be careful that we don't take away some of the critical thinking our students need to do when they are searching on the internet.

I can see that Glogster may be a fun site for students to use to make a multi-media "poster" and this is a site I want to do more exploring on. Unfortunately, my old home computer cannot keep up with this site, and I have not had time to visit this site at work.

Additionally, I am excited to explore the possibilities of posting a link to a delicious account on the wiki we have set up for next year's biology classes. If that doesn't work, at the very least it will be a great way to share websites with other biology teachers.

I look forward to having more time to "fool around" with and become more comfortable with these sites. At this point, I just have not had the time to really master all of these tools. But, as we move forward into the 21st Century of teaching, I believe these will be valuable resources for us as teachers and for our students.