Bob Whalen slm521mc – Teacher Websites

The Revolutionary War Internet Scavenger Hunt created by Jan Purnell and her students is a wonderful site to use for 8^th grade students studying the American Revolution. The site gives 34 questions concerning various aspects of the American Revolution. It is in chronological order starting in 1763 and ending with a New Nation. The questions provide links to many other valuable websites as the History Place, and a calendar site where you can determine what day of the week it is for any day in history. There are also primary sources as the quote, “I have but one life to give for my country!” There are also some questions dealing with women in the revolution. This site provides a good overview of the American Revolution and would be good to use at the beginning of the unit. Also, this website provides an instructor’s answer key. As with any sites, sometimes a few of the links do not work at times as the Encarta Encyclopedia. The questions in general could be developed into higher level questions rather than “What happened on December 16^th?, What happened on March 5^th? The pop ups that come up with the different links are annoying, and detract a bit from the site. For the future the section on Revolutionary Battles could be expanded. Overall this is a high interest site for students. http://mrspskids.tripod.com/rwhunt.html

Mrs. Decosa’s School Web Page of the Oswego City School District, NY provides a model web page to keep parents informed. It is very user friendly. Topics include Assignments, Current Topics, and Daily Bloopers – which offer some humor into common grammar errors by students; Writing Tips, Course Overview, Parent’s Page, Resources, and Student Work. I especially liked the course overview, which outlined the course and grading percentage according to class work, homework, tests, and quizzes. The very specific examples of excellent student work get a special kudos! The website exhibited good communication to parents of questions they would want to know about English. This website also provided links to the school web page. The assignments are the first item listed, but I had trouble finding the link to the SchoolNotes.com site. Despite Mrs. Decosa’s page being so very user friendly I was unsure how to find a listing of updated work. It would also be nice to have access to a listing of all student work/assignments that have been given. I see the next step as possibly having a program for parents to access student grades online. This web page can be used as a model for what features a school web page should have. http://oswego.org/staff/jdecosa/web/