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Elementary level tutorial for evaluating web sites

"n2edu.com provides free teacher and pupil resources. Learn to Think, Learn to Learn. Online for 15+ years. The developers are pioneering in providing integrated thematic unit learning resources, that provide a basis from which rich learning tasks can be undertaken. We are one of the leading educational web-sites for educators in New Zealand."

A few suggestions about how you can obtain the best search results possible when doing a simple web search.

ThingLink is a web tool for creating interactive images now it offers a video option. ."Post offers a guide to using ThingLink.visu to create a video.

"A list of the best 4 web tools for creating screenshots. Besides being free, these tools are very simple to use and are also student friendly. They will allow you to  capture your screen, crop and annotate your pictures using  arrows, colours, shapes, text and many more." It is always great to have visuals as part of any explanation to students (or for them to use as well)> These 4 are briefly explained and look easy to use.

Good infographic on plagiarism. It would be a useful document to use with students to teach them about plagiarism: what constitutes an act of plagiarism and the different types of copyright violations that can occur. The image is not free. You read it online as large version by clicking on the image but you will need to purchase it if you want a copy to put up onto a wall. If you are looking for what web tools are available to help detect plagiarism this list is a good place to start.

Online-Research-Methods. Infographic. It offers a range of research platforms to use with students. Instead of just using Google and Wikipedia, students can try out some other specific search engines to look for specific information. The infographic could also be used to assist in teaching students about how to evaluate websites and assess the credibility of web content.

"This is a repository of educational apps for teachers and students. Below is a document created using Google Docs and in which is featured a variety of platforms and web resources where teachers and educators can find educational apps.

A chart that compares four useful web tools for creating posters and inforgaphics. It looks at the cost and what you can do with each. These tools are all quite student friendly and less technically complex.

"Depending on your point of view, content on the internet can be a vast collection of treasures or a big pile of gold specks mixed in with an even bigger pile of dirt.  This has given rise to content curation, the process of finding the gold among the dirt, as a very popular online activity. At its most basic, content curation is the process of finding, organizing, and presenting content from the flood of information and media that inundate the web by the second.  Similar to museum curators, content curators sift through a seemingly never-ending amount of digital objects to unearth individual items worthy of being showcased for a specific audience."

"The familiar narrative of teens and technology is one of natural proficiency - that young people just get technology in a way that older generations don't. But research suggests that just because children feel at home using smartphones, it doesn't mean they're more aware of the nuances of how the web works. In a new report published by the UK's telecoms watchdog Ofcom, researchers found that only a third of young people aged 12 to 15 knew which search results on Google were adverts, while this figure was even lower - less than one in five - for children aged 8 to 11"

Wheel of Names is a free random name picker website. There are many random name pickers available on the web but this one offer a bit more then most because it not only lets you enter names, it lets you upload images to be chosen at random. Wheel of Names also lets you create a free account that you can use to save a series of wheels. That option could be helpful if you have multiple classes and don't want to enter names whenever you need to pick a name at random.

Create a spreadsheet in Google Docs which converts to timeline when you save to the web via Timeline JS

This looks like a useful tool

A digital storytelling wheel that features quite a few interesting resources that your students could use in class to create and share digital stories.  They have been organized into 3 types: iPad apps , Android apps, and Web tools for digital storytelling.

A useful article about the profession. Teacher librarians have been teaching students how to evaluate websites and warning students about the dangers of going out on the world wide web without applying a critical lens to what they find since the inception of the internet. We constantly remind our students to evaluate websites and ask questions. Concluding paragraph: "Not only is our profession as school librarians crucial in shining the light of literacy on our students, but we must never forget the importance of our fight against information illiteracy. The very survival of our republic depends on an educated, engaged, and information-savvy populace".

This is a visual search engine for kids powered by Google, offering safe kids web, image and video search.

"Information Literacy that works. Give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. We call the "things to do" moves and there are four of them: Stop; Investigate the source; Find trusted coverage; Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context."

Scootle is a website which is a way of locating any of the 8000 items/learning objects in the Learning Federation for K-12. It just makes it easier to locate, download and manage required items, and a means to access this bank of resources. You can manage the resources into folders of your own, and can give instructions and/or comments for each item. It provides a URL for students or other staff to access your bank of resources webpage.

Useful tips from a classroom teacher. "Using forms in Google docs lets anyone create forms quickly and share those forms via email, embed them into a webpage or blog. If you are a teacher, you can create formulas that allow you to have these forms graded in minutes. The formula part is a bit challenging, so I wrote this article to talk about how I recently created a final for one of my classes."