Last week we looked at delicio.us (http://delicious.com), one of the social bookmarking services and saw that there is a quite variety of resources available on the web. So it becomes necessary to understand how credible the information they contain is. What for? The materials of this lesson will help you to get a better idea about it.

Have a look at the list of criteria for evaluation created by M. Krauss and Anholt and then use them to evaluate the resources listed after these criteria:

Answer the following questions "yes" or "no". If you have more than 9 "Yes" answers, you can use resource you have found or were recommended to use.

OBJECTIVITY/ADVOCACY:

Some articles are written to report information objectively (without the author’s opinion). Other articles are written to “advocate” the author’s point of view, either for or against an issue. It is okay to use advocacy articles, but you also need to find an equal number of articles from the other side’s point of view.

1.___Is it clear to you that this article is either objective reporting or an advocacy article?
Which is it? (check one) ___objective ___advocacy

2.___Is more than one viewpoint expressed?

3.___Can you identify the name of the organization that put up this Web site?
Which organization is sponsoring it?

AUTHORITY:

1. ___Do you know who wrote the information on this page?

2. ___Is there a link to contact the author?

3. ___ Is there information to show that the author is knowledgeable or an expert?

Check the URL (Web address). A tilde (~) means the page is a personal one, not part of an organization’s official Web site. Try putting the author’s name into Google. See what else s/he has written. You can also put the URL into Google. This will show you which sites link to the page you found.

ACCURACY
1. ___ Can you tell where the author got his/her information? Are there links to the sources?

2. ___ Is the information typed correctly, with correct grammar and spelling?

CURRENCY:
It is important to have up-to-date information. Some Web sites have old information that is still useful, but if the actual Web site is not updated, you may doubt the information which is presented.

1. ___Can you find the date that this article was originally written?
Date:

2. ___Can you find the date that this article was put on the Web?
Date:

3. ___Can you find the date that this article was revised?

4. ___Click on three links in the text (if there are links in the text). Are all the links working?

COVERAGE:
Some Web sites are collections of links to other Web sites. They are useful, but they not considered a “source” of information for your paper.

1. ___Does this Web site contain original information?

2. ___Does this article contain information that will help you with your paper?

Another form for web-site evaluation is located at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/EvalForm.pdf

First, apply these criteria to the analysis of two websites listed below

1. Mankato, Minnesota (http://www.mankato-mn.gov/)
2. Mankato, Minnesota (http://descy.50megs.com/mankato/Mankato.html)

In the thread following this post write your evaluation of these sites and see what your peers have to say about it.

Next, read A short introduction to the study of Holocaust revisionism, by Arthur R. Butz (http://www.codoh.com/butz/di/intro.html) and then the article by Alan November "Teaching Zack to Think" (http://novemberlearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/teaching-zack-to-think.pdf) which serves as an excellent illustration of why it is important to analyze the credibility of information you find on the web.. In your post, explain whether it is important to evaluate the quality of information on the internet. Why?

Finally, visit one of the sites listed below and post a comment with its evaluation: is it credible or not? How do you know?

* Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (http://zapatopi.net/afdb/)
* Facts About from Idiotica (http://www.idiotica.com/cranium/encyclopedia/)
* Should we ban dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) (http://www.dhmo.org/)?
* Museum of Hoaxes (http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/)
* California's Velcro Crop under Challenge (1993) (http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html)
* Did the Holocaust happen? (http://www.jimloy.com/history/holocaus.htm)
* Physics and Star Trek (http://www.physicsguy.com/physandtrek/)
* The Faked Apollo Landings (http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html)

(Author: Jill Haslam - Email jhaslam@dsdmail.net)

Post your comment in this thread.

Hello--

These activities should help you understand and remember the distinguishing features of computer-based resources.

Below a number of different resources is provided. Choose one of them and analyse a specific activity on it against the special features of computer-based resources. Provide an explanation:

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish
2. http://www.englishclub.com

These are vast and popular resources with a great variety of materials aimed at the development of different language skills. Choose a specific activity for the development of one of the skills and complete its analysis in terms of whether its has the features listed below and to what extent

a) interactivity: How How is the content of instruction presented? is the dialogue with the user organized?
b) multisensensory delivery: To what extent the information presentation is multisensory and how is it realized?
c) adaptability
d) non-linear presentation of material
e) individual design: Is the interface standardized? Is the design of the of a particular activity appealing? What do you find particularly attractive about it?
f) special user training: Is any special user training necessary to use the resource to its full potential?

Post your answers in this thread. Read another student's comment and comment on it.

Hello--

Last time we discussed with you what tags are, what their uses are both as a tool to mark the texts you create to make it easier for the others to find what you post online and for you to find what other people post. Let's say you have found what you were looking for. What's the next step? Maybe making a collection of the resources you have found. Here what can help you to build a systematic collection is use one of the social bookmarking tools. They are built on the idea of tags you are already familiar with and allow you to create an online catalogue of your own resources and get access to the resources other people found useful.

At present, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites is delicious.com. So today I am inviting you to register an account on delicious.com and then have a look at some of the resources in my collection of bookmarks:

http://www.delicious.com/nataneva

What I would like you to do is choose one of the resources in my collection devoted to the discussion of using the technology in the classroom and create you own bookmark using http://www.delicious.com.

Next, post a comment in the blog discussing the possible use of this tool with your students.

Do you know what tags are? Do you have an idea how they can help you and your learners? When I started this blog I did not understand how tags can help and what can be done with their help. But I think I have figured it out by now. They can help you locate the information you are looking for and filter it. By marking a piece of information with a tag or a set of tags you indicate what the focus of a certain entry is. Your tags can also help your friends find the information that they are interested in by having a look at your tags list.

Can tagging be useful for teaching the language? No doubt about it. How? Tags can be considered as one-word summaries of a text and you can ask your students to come up with a tag (and later with a series of tags) for a story or article you are reading with them. Then they can discuss different tags they have marked a text with and decide which are more precise. They can also explain their choice of tags for a given text. Such activities can help them learn to summarise something they have read, among other things.

Here is what I'd like you to do. As you have just read in the beginning I did not use tagging in this blog but recently I decided to go back to the entries made earlier in this blog and tag them. But I realised that it'd be a useful activity for you to do as well. So, what you should do is look through a couple of entries in this blog and tag them. You can start with having a look at those entries that have been tagged by me to get a better understanding of the idea of tagging. You can add your tags to the entries I have already tagged and/or tag those that have not been tagged yet.

When done post an entry in the thread explaining what you have learned from this activity and giving a suggestion about possible use of tags in your teaching context.

Do you use sticky notes? Would you like to use them electronically? LinoIt gives you such a chance. Need some suggestions about how to use them? Here is a brief information about it:

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/lino-delivers-online-stickes/

Today you will have a chance to get acquainted with a number of textbooks and resource books on using the technology in the classroom. First, I'll say a couple of words about each of them and then I'll give you a chance to have a closer look at them. Your task is to get a general idea about the content of the book you have chosen and post an entry in the blog about it answering the following questions:

1. What type of books is it: a textbook, a reference book, a resource book...
2. Who is the intended audience for this resource?
3. Write a short review of the book to give your peers and idea about it iso that they could have a closer look at it in the future for their own classes. Don't forget to include the book's publication details. If you are not quite sure about reference layout use the Citation Builder (http://www.sourceaid.com/citationbuilder/). This is a tool which automatically creates references from the information you enter in the provided fields.

Here is a link to the Top 100 Tools for Learning: http://c4lpt.co.uk/top-tools/top-100-tools-for-learning-2011/: choose one your are not familiar read its description and what people are saying about it from the point of view of how it can be used in teaching and explain how you could use it in your teaching context. It will be your 3rd post!

Go to at least 2 of the places listed in my first post, get acquainted with them and write your 2nd post in this blog in which you will reflect on something you have learned for yourself in these "places" and ask some questions about something you read about to learn more.

Write a post about your experience in using some tool or tools in the process of studying at the university. Explain what tool you have used and for what purpose (e.g. PPP for some courses you have taken; FB, Vkontakte or some other social network , audio or video recording software such as Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), social bookmarking tools such as delicious (http://www.delicious.com/nataneva) or something completely different). It will be your 1st blog post:) It should be about 150 words. Please, post it in the blog and comment on one of the posts written by your peers.

Dear students--

Welcome to the course of ICT in ELT! This blog is going to be one of the tools that will be used in this course. I am inviting you to use this space as much and as creatively as you can. For a start there are several things to do with it.

You can make your posts more interesting by adding images to them when it seems necessary and/or appropriate, create picture galleries, add some music and/or video clips or something altogether different. I am sure you will have many ideas which will make this blog a welcoming place to visit.

Here is the explanation of what you should do today and for the next class. Do you enjoy listening to your MP3 player? Have you recently made a PowerPoint Presentation (http://actden.com/pp/index.htm)? When was the last time you chatted with somebody on Skype (http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/welcomeback/)? Do you remember what was the last thing you looked up on Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/). These are some of the tools the use of which in the language classroom we are going to discuss and practise using during the course.

First, I'm inviting you to complete the survey I have designed to learn about your familiarity with the tools we are going to discuss and practise using in this course:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/MySurvey_EditorFull.aspx?sm=1buU0Kr7ZXX4Fy2NdIKdPudN6c3ETC4CDd0I5Un3aTQ%3d

Please complete it to help me get a better idea about what you already know about some ICT tools and how you use them.

Also below I have listed some of the resources I have created for the courses I teach, for communication with my colleagues or just for fun. Now to the tasks:)

1. Write a post about your experience in using some tool or tools in the process of studying at the university. Explain what tool you have used and for what purpose (e.g. PPP for some courses you have taken; FB, Vkontakte or some other social network , audio or video recording software such as Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), social bookmarking tools such as delicious (http://www.delicious.com/nataneva) or something completely different). It will be your 1st blog post:) It should be about 150 words. Please, post it in the blog and comment on one of the posts written by your peers. Here is a link to it:

http://nataliaeydelman.livejournal.com/19483.html

2. Write about what you want to achieve in this course by the end of the semester (you should write it on a piece of paper and submit it to me in class next week). I'll keep it till the end of the semester when I'll give them back to you so that you could see what you have achieved by the end of the semester.

3. Here are some of its examples of what I have done using technology:

a) Research work: MA dissertation about teaching writing using MS Word, blogs and wikis It is not published on the Internet as a whole, but I made a presentation about it at the IATEFL Conference in Harrogate last year and you can have a look at my presentation at:

b) Assignments in the modules of the MA TESOL & ICT program - http://bestpolicies.pbworks.com/w/page/25711811/FrontPage A wiki about plagiarism I designed to help my students learn about what constitutes it and how to learn to write without plagiariasing

c) Writing for my students: course tasks and comments

- http://el-writing-project.ning.com/ This is a Ning I have created to help my students with different aspects of writing. It was also one of the spaces which was used for my research project. We are going to use it with you too for reference.

- http://nataliaeydelman.livejournal.com/ This is a blog of the course Information communication technologies (ICT) in English language teaching (ELT). This is a Methods course about how to use technology in the classroom.

- http://acwr962.pbworks.com/w/page/29851864/FrontPage This is a wiki of one of the groups of your peers I taught last year.

d) Writing for my colleagues: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/sessionreport

In 2009 I went to attend the IATEFL conference in Cardiff as the winner of the Roving Reporters' competition and wrote about my experiences and impressions on the site of the conference:

e) Writing for pleasure http://nataliaeydelman.wordpress.com/ This is a blog about my August trip to England

Go to at least 2 of the places listed above, get acquainted with them and write your 2nd post in this blog (http://nataliaeydelman.livejournal.com/19925.html) in which you will reflect on what you have read in one of these "places" and ask some questions about something you read about to learn more.

Finally, here is a link to the Top 100 Tools for Learning: http://c4lpt.co.uk/top-tools/top-100-tools-for-learning-2011/: choose one your are not familiar read its description and what people are saying about it from the point of view of how it can be used in teaching and explain how you could use it in your teaching context. It will be your 3rd post:

http://nataliaeydelman.livejournal.com/20108.html

Have a great journey!