miércoles, 26 de octubre de 2011

Reflections on week 3


The Web is growing rapidly; it is amazing the amount of information on the Internet. There are loads of websites on the Internet and many of them have links to many other sites. If using the Internet is seen as an option to enhance the learning process in the classroom, we cannot and should not let our students wandering online visiting any pages through just a click. A lot of the information online is not reviewed, unlike traditional printed materials such as books, magazines and newspapers; no one has to approve the content before it is made public. I doubt very much there’s a reviewing process by an authority before publishing information on a website. Anyone can say anything and students often believe "if it's on the Internet, it must be right."  I was a bit stunned after watching the video about web literacy. I wondered what would happen if that was happening for real and those students didn’t have anyone guiding them on how to carry out a search online, they would just believe anything that is on the Web; this is terrifying! Therefore, I believe it is up to us, teachers, to teach students how to carry out a search online effectively.

Now, regarding search engines on the Internet, I reckon Google is the best one. It delivers relevant and comprehensive search results, it loads quickly, you can do several searches such as images, videos, books, maps, you can translate words and sentences ( I don’t suggest to translate long sentences). I’ve used other search engines but I stick to Google. However, it is also useful to know a few tips in order to carry out a good search, for example the use of double quotes around a set of words, the use of – symbol before a word to exclude it from search, to define our keywords properly, etc.

With respect to copyrights, it is important to respect other people’s work on the Web. I guess if we don’t pay attention to copyrights online then someday people might not be willing to share their knowledge on the Web and we would have less new teaching ideas on the Internet.

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