Think Aloud

Website Evaluation

Who is the source of the information?  
 They gave a fake list of authors for the site. They gave all of them impressive resumes. You must pay attention, at the bottom of the site, it gives a link to the real authors.  They are Gerald Aungst and Lauren Zucker. Gerald is a Supervisor of Gifted Education in the Cheltenham School District in Elkins Park, PA. Lauren a Library Media Specialist in Centennial School District, and also taught middle and high school English. 



What are you getting? 
A fictional site. This is a site made by a group of teachers to teach students how to use the internet. Most of the information on the website is fictional, or made up. They made the site look legitimate, but it's fake. They did a good job, just by looking at it, I thought it was real. They got me,

When was the site created?
It doesn't say when the site was created. It does say that the site was updated on June 17th 2011. So that tells me that it is a current site.


Where? 
It is a ".com" website. This goes along with the content of the site. Anyone can make a ".com" site, which is why the teachers can make a false site. Clever. I like this site.

I love this site. This was such a great idea. This is a good way to catch the students who don't pay attention to what they are researching. I'd like to implement this in my class somehow, just to see if anyone catches on.

Graph

These are the reading scores from a 11th graders with a variety of demographic backgrounds. 

The highest score came from number 8, which is Special Education, which scored a 67.94%.  The lowest score cam from number 1, which is the Asian demographic, with 11.86%.  Series 1 has the highest and lowest scores, which will give them more dispersed answers than series 2.  Series 2 does not have the wide variances with scores, therefore they fall under  a leptokurtic graph.

Graph Analysis

1.)What type of skewness? 

The skewness is positive. Distribution A is the most positive and Distribution C is the least.

2.) Where is the distribution most concentrated?

The skewness is most concentrated in distribution C. 

3.) How is the data dispersion?

They are dispersed because the skewness increases up in the center of graphs.

Voki Teaching Philosophy

Magazine Cover

Teaching Media Literacy

"Choosing appropriate search engines, following relevant links, and judging the validity of information are difficult challenges, not only for students of all ages, but also for most adults, including many teachers. More than half the adults surveyed in Great Britain were not able to use search engines or databases at a basic level (Buckingham,2007). In the United States, almost two-thirds of a national sample of adults doing online searches were not aware of the difference between paid and unpaid search results and believed that search engines provide fair and unbiased results for any given search (Fallows,2005)."

Libraries are almost thing of the past. When I was a little kid we had to actually look things up in books. Thankfully, Google has since been invented, and has made the world a much better place. It can be used as such a great tool, but it’s important to be educated on how to use it the right way. Just like we were taught how to use the Dewey Decimal System, we need to teach students how to find information on the Internet. They need to be able to dicier which sites will provide good information, and which ones to avoid.

I think this picture is a good representation of a teacher showing a student how to do something on the computer.

"Moral Theology of the Marketplace." (2003): n. pag. Web. 5 Oct 2011. <http://www.t3portal.org/T3_Portal_v1/!SSL!/WebHelp/patrick_flanagan/flanagap_syllabus.htm>.

"Visual literacy is a learned "reading" of images. Semiotics is the study of how the reading of signs and symbols together communicate complicated  ideas in the form of codes (Lester,2000). Just as a basic textual literacy uses vocabulary, metaphors, and genres, visual literacy employs colors, icons, and various media to communicate ideas and feelings to readers."

This is very interesting to me. I've always been the kind of person who looks deeper into things, not just take it as it seems. I think this is pretty fun to dive into the meanings of each object. It's like the old saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Taking a single picture can describe so many different things, and have multiple meanings. I liked the George Bush picture. At first glance, it just looks like he is standing somewhere in the white house in front of a general picture. When you look deeper into the picture, you find out it wasn't a random picture he just so happened to be standing by. He was by a picture of Theodore Roosevelt that was strategically placed behind him as he declared war.
 Another place where you see this a lot is on College Gameday, which is a college football and basketball show that is  live on ESPN that travels to campus' all over the country. Behind the set is a sea of college students cheering loudly for their respective teams and holding dozens of signs. To get their point across, some of the signs are simply a picture.

This picture shows Lee Corso making his pick for the winner of that days big game. For this game, he has chosen Texas to win. It looks like everyone is having a good time, people smiling and laughing and he is giving the "hook-em horn" sign.


"The Maneater." Photograph.Saturday morning in Austin. Goldman Lenny. 2008. Web. 2 Oct 2011. <http://www.themaneater.com/blogs/live-blog-missouri-texas-2009-jun-02/2008/10/18/saturday-morning-austin/>.