Oil Map Activity

When using an interactive website, its easy to want to ask simple questions rather than thought provoking questions unless you really work with the website and all that it has to offer. I like the idea of making them use the information and take it even further by making them use all of the websites features as well as other resources to compare to the information given. For example, I brought up on my assignment that population would be a great statistic to add to the information given and to think about why the consumption could be higher for smaller countries.

I also think it's important to remind students to always think about where the information is coming from and when the data was gathered. What I love about the internet, technology and science is that it is always changing and I like to remind my students that they will be the face of our future in all of these things. They will be making these sites in the future, they will be contributing to these statistics.

Be Funky!

Contributions to Wikipedia

Finding a topic to write about on Wikipedia was hard at first, but definitely much easier on Simple English. The contributions I made are short, I don't claim to be an expert on anything!

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jramos18

Wikipedia Comparison

My first impression of Wikipedia in Simple English is that it is short and easy to read. I had a hard time picking a topic that was found on Wikipedia, which I thought would have been easy. The topic I picked to compare was Yosemite National Park. I love this park and used to take 7/8th graders backpacking there every summer before I moved here to Colorado. I've got a great story about almost being licked by a brown bear! Well, on Wikipedia(Simple English), it only talked breifly about its history and not in geologic terms which is it's most interesting attribute! In regular English there was much more information and tons more topics to read about. There was also a map showing its location right on the front page.
When searching Yosemite on Encyclopedia Britannica, my first impression was that there were obnoxious ads that slowed the loading time, which was very annoying. It was also much harder to navigate through, making it really hard just to find simple facts about my topic. It's also has more annoying pop ups, and to be honest, I really won't ever use that site again and don't even want to go back to it to finish evaluating it! All in all, I think I'm starting to like Wikipedia way more than I used to!

Using Youtube

Making a movie using various clips was frustrating, but in the end very gratifying. I realized that the videos my students were making in class weren't as hard as I thought they would be! I use video clips from movies to engage the students on different topics all the time and I think this would be a great way to create a video that can be accessed anywhere that has internet access!

Weather in Costa Rica

Wish I could be here right now!
Check out http://www.wunderground.com/ for weather anywhere in the world! This is a great website my students used when working on their weather projects.