Blog Reflection Week 2

The information on the website Victorian Robots, does not seem credible.  There is no actual proof that any of these robots existed and worked.  The linked websites do not seem credible either.  They talk about many different things that are cartoons and movies.  I used Altavista, Excite, and Infoseek to search Victorian robots.  Some start with pictures and/or videos about them.  They all had something relating to the history of the Victorian Age close to the top of the list of related sites.  They all had the website bigredhair.com/robots as the top choice.  Altavista and Excite did not have a lot of advertisements but Infoseek does have advertisements.  I would say that search engines use advertisements to help pay for their company.  Each time someone clicks the link going to their ad, the search engine gets a certain amount of money.  Almost every search engine uses crawler-based technology for their searches now.  Some started out as popularity, meaning they went by the most used websites relating to the topic.  Others started out as crawler-based, which means it spiders the web looking for keywords and phrases to get results.  There are also hybrid search engines, which are gaining in popularity.  These search engines use both crawler-based searches and human-powered or popular searches and display both results.  There is no author for bigredhair.com listed on easywhois.com.  The website itself shows that Paul Guinan is the author though.  There are no records for this site on any other site.  I tried looking up the author and the history of the site and nothing comes up.  I would assume the purpose of this site is to present information.  There have been no changes to the information that I can tell over the past ten years.  I think that this is nothing more than I have done before just easier.  I always try to cross reference my information I get on the internet.  This is done by getting the same information from multiple websites and search engines.  I am very confident with the information that I have used in the past throughout my college studies.

 If we fail to teach our students about these unreliable websites then they will go on thinking everything is true if it is on the internet.  I know my son tried to write a research paper with using only Wikipedia and I had to keep showing him in different websites that about half of his information was just made up or not true.  We must teach our students how to tell if a site is reliable or not.  There are many different ways to do this but it just needs to be done.

The biggest advantage to using social bookmarking is your information is available anywhere you have an internet connection.  If you find a really good website at home and you want to use it at school, you can just bookmark it on delicious and pull it up at school.  The old way was to copy and paste the url into an email and hope it goes through right.  This is going to be a big help for me teaching math and science because I can sit at home and find cool videos and things for my students and be able to show them at school without having to use my computer.

The purpose I had in mind when I created my wiki is communication.  I teach at a really small school and we have to coordinate everything including lunches and free time with all the grades because we are all in one small building.  I have not implemented my ideas yet but we are having staff development days next week and I plan on telling everyone about the wiki I started there so we can go ahead and start coordinating activities and lessons.  The biggest advantage with wikis is that anyone can see them so we don’t have to email everyone every time something changes and hope that the email went through.  We just post it to the wiki and everyone sees it. The main disadvantage though is that anyone can edit it and change things without consent.  I am not sure what I want to explore further, all I know is I want to try to explore any kind of technology that will benefit myself, my students, and my school as a whole.