Google= 1 Followed by One Hundred 0s , Successful Searching= 1 Out of Them

With the development of Network, the innumerable information emerges like the original meaning of the term googol, which is the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Last Friday, I discussed with my group members about the research topic “How does bipolar disorder affect adolescents social and cognitive abilities in a school atmosphere”, after we typed the key words bipolar disorder of adolescents in the Search text box of Google, we got 7,800,000 results. How can we grab our desired information among the tremendous amount of data within limited time? Learning the functions and characteristics of “the subject directories and the search engines” (Shelly, Gunter, Gunter, 126), investigating the strategies and techniques of searching of the Web, grasping the ability of using the subject directories and search engines is the basic skill of our “digital natives or immigrants” (Shelly, Gunter, Gunter, 16).

According to Limiting the Search(Shelly, Gunter, Gunter, 131), we entered the phrase “bipolar disorder” of adolescents affect social and cognitive abilities within quotation marks, through avoiding the useless links, narrowing the range of searching, the result is more exact. One of our group members noticed one interesting point is that the results showed in both lowercase and uppercase after typing the keywords in lowercase, however, only the uppercase results for the uppercase keywords. During this process, we also click the categorized links on the page of Federal Resources for Educational Excellence(FREE) www.free.ed.gov.

After the discussion, I was ready to save the pages on the web we found in my favorites of my laptop as usual. While one of our group members didn’t bring her laptop, she suggested us to store the Web sites in our Diigo accounts and then shared with each other, avoiding the risk of laptop crashes at the same time. To be honest, it was my first time to use Diigo to store valuable Web sites. I was immediately attracted by its amazing functions of highlight and sticky notes. The most incredible part is that my highlights and sticky notes on Diigo are persistent, I can still see my highlights and sticky notes when I return to the original pages, that is the same as reading a real book. On the other hand, Diigo can also be teachers’ helpful assistant of collection and arrangement of lesson materials. With sticky notes, teachers are able to mark the teaching resources conveniently, record their opinions and views and then divide the relevant resources into different categorized groups, in order to prepare for the reuse, extension and supplement in the future teaching process.

My favorite one among the teaching tools listed on pages 132 through 134 is teAchnology http://www.teachnology.com/, which provides countless rubrics, lesson plans, worksheets and teaching tips. The site is written at an appropriate level and the information is well organized, suitable for teaching and easy to read, especially updated quite frequently. Another Web site I prefer is Blue Web’N (AT&T Knowledge etwork)www.kn.pacebell.com/wired. It offers thousands of activities, games, projects, resources and tools. In that case, the student-centered teaching goes together with pleasure. It is one of the important teaching means to make teaching and learning happy and lively, and it is also an artistic state to show the bilateral harmonious activities in the teaching procedure. The samples of grants on the site are quite useful for the students who are learning how to write a request for proposal or grant source like me. The last Web page I’d like to recommend is Pedagonet www.pedagonet.com. What is worth mentioning is that except download the videos, worksheets and quizzes, teachers can also post their own resources. It’s a lot of fun to do the brain teasers, I already finished most of them.

I’m curious about the rules and policies Department of Education of Florida, after scanning the Department of Education (DOE) site listed for Florida, I find that it’s so convenient for students, teachers and parents. For students, it provides the information for career planning, courses and financial aid and scholarships. For teachers, it shows the instructional ideas and standards. For parents, it supplies lots of school data and statistics. Locating the page of Orange County Public Schools https://www.ocps.net/, I notice that this Web site is a bridge, which connects students, teachers, parents and citizens in the nearby community.

Comparing with my country, I realize that the backward system of educational online resources makes it inevitable that Chinese education as a whole remains out of pace with the overall international educational development. As the educators in the digital age, we should use the search techniques and search tools successfully to pick the most useful information we desire among the thousands of information on Google which jumps into our eyes per second.

Su

Reference:

Shelly, G., Gunter, G. & Gunter, R. (2009). Teachers Discovering Computers: Integrating Technology and Digital Media in the Classroom, 6th Ed. Boston, MA: Course Technology.

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