Week 2 - Reflection # 1 - Websearching

Hello, Donna and classmates

During this week we have covered three interesting topics that particularly have enriched my general computer knowledge and the way that I see my learners and teaching style.

To start, we had to try, analyze and discuss about different search engines and then suggest some of them depending on our teaching needs. I am a big fan of GOOGLE, but I found out that there are some other useful search engines and websites that are not so popular but helpful as GOOGLE.

I think that it is very important to know and keep in mind these other choices for web searching according to our teaching and students’ needs because searching on line can be fun and interesting but also time consuming and very frustrating when we feel that we are wasting our time and not going anywhere.

From the list we got, I tried some of the first options and searched for a basic grammar topic. I realized that INTUTE (http://www.intute.ac.uk/search.html) , INFOMINE (http://infomine.ucr.edu/) and ACADEMIC INFO SUBJECT GUIDES (http://www.academicinfo.net/subject-guides) are great sources of information for college and university students. However, I was more interested in brief and clear explanations and also extra materials for my English classes. Therefore I found very interesting and recommend using:

1) BING (as an alternative to GOOGLE)

http://www.bing.com/ 

2) ISEEK EDUCATION (you can target your search and get more specific “hits” and “links”)

http://education.iseek.com/iseek/home.page 

and

3) TWURDY (the “hits” and “links” are arranged from easier to harder to read so that you can choose the most suitable information according to your students ‘ English level.)

http://www.twurdy.com/

Sincerely, J.C.