Response Blog 2: Web site Evaluation Lesson

For this assignment, I'm going to have to be a little create to put a preschool special education twist on website evaluation.  Typically, with the preschool special education population, we work on functional skills like hand washing, color recognition, and taking turns with peers in play.  So, for the most part, we are not asking our 3-5 year old students to evaluate the merits of resources.  Nevertheless, there are always some surprise students that end up on our itinerant teachers' caseloads, in speech therapy, or even in some of our developmental delay or autistic support classrooms that can read and therefore require some truly individualized instruction. 

Specifically, I had a student, we'll call him Andy, on my itinerant caseload, 4 years ago, who was 5 years old and reading at approximately a 4th grade level.  He was a highly functioning autistic child whose family did not want him in a classroom setting.  Therefore, I provided educational therapy for him, at home, on a bi-weekly basis, for 30 minutes per session.  Andy loved dinosaurs.  He read books about dinosaurs, drew pictures of dinosaurs, completed 150-piece dinosaur puzzles, and even had a dinosaur themed daily schedule and reward chart that I made for him at the CCIU Teachers' Center .  Andy and I did play some games on my laptop now and then, but I never gave him the chance to explore dinosaur websites during our weekly sessions.

One of his IEP  goals was to attend to non-preferred adult directed activities for 12-15 minutes.  Even though the topic of dinosaurs is one that Andy preferred, being asked to answer questions about the websites that discussed dinosaurs would not be a preferred activity for Andy.  So, I would still have been able to track his adequate weekly and yearly progress while completing this assignment.

In order to get him engaged and thinking about usefulness and safety on the Internet, I would have worked with him to complete the "E=Examine The Content Worksheet" on page 45 on our text book.  Andy could have chosen 5 or so dinosaurs to research more on depth.  He could have answered the questions posed and deciphered between useful/educational and outdated/inadequate sites.  We could have also talked about how just searching for, say, allosaurus would have yielded a lot of facts about that dinosaur; but searching for specifics like what allisaurus ate and the time period in which he lived would have require some additional search words.

In order to have gone a little deeper in our searches, Andy could have used this Elementary School Critical Web Page Evaluation Tool http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/evalelem.html from Kathy Schrock's web page to evaluate pages that he found particularly useful.  Once Andy had found sites that had the most authentic and accurate information, he could have made a little book about his favorite dinosaurs.  It could be something similar to this book on this Enchanted Learning website, which is a site I used a lot as an itinerant teacher.  However, Andy could have cut out (another non-preferred activity for him) pictures of dinosaurs that he printed off of his top web sites and chosen which characteristics he wanted to include on each page.  And finally, the worksheets on The Learning Page would have been great supplements to give to his parents to follow through with the lesson. 

You do have to join both Enchanted Learning and The Learning Page to get full access to their resources, but the resources contained within them were invaluable to me when I was teaching without a set curriculum in the itinerant special education world.  Also, joining was a minimal fee each year.  His parents were very passionate about following through with what we worked on each week, and I'm sure they would have happily joined one or both of the sites to give him a chance to work online a little more while at home.