Collecting reputable digital resources

In order to prepare for teaching an online course this fall, I used https://delicious.com to compile links to a number of sites that I plan to use throughout the year.  Most of these are websites that I've used in the past, but a couple are new sources that I plan to use this year.  The course I will be teaching online is AP Environmental Science.  I've never taught this course before.  I will also be teaching physics, AP Physics I, and chemistry in a traditional classroom setting this fall.  I linked a number of resources for those as well for use in and out of class.

I'd never used a social bookmarking site before.  I feel that it is a bit unnecessary, but it is cool that other science teachers can look and see what I am using and that I can look and see what they are using.  Also, in getting sites to bookmark, I brushed up on embed code which will no doubt be useful for online teaching.

Since I'm writing about embedding videos, I'm going to link a video here.

The clip goes over the Coriolis Effect, so it has both physics and environmental science applications.

Anyhow, here is a link to my Delicious bookmarks.

Three useful tools

Three useful tools that I found in my web walkabout are this online data plotting service, Plotly.  It is great for quickly plotting real world science data and easily accessible anywhere with web access.

A second useful tool I found is this screencasting service, Screencastomatic.  It can be used to make screencasts but is also great for taking clips from longer videos.

A third useful tool I found is The Howard Hughes Medical Institute site.  I actually learned about this at my AP environmental science training and can't wait to explore it.

Teaching students to collect useful sources

It is often said that todays students are the tech generation.  Teachers often assume that they know how to use technology to find useful resources.  This may be true in some areas (video games, social media sites, etc), but it is not generally true that students know how to search for or how to evaluate sites for education.

Students actually have to be taught the basics - how to perform a simple search engine search for the topic.  With this they need to be taught the importance of knowing the correct vocabulary.  If you just search chemistry, you'll get lots of hits for a chemistry student, but most of it won't be useful.  If you search stoichiometry of acids and bases, you'l get much more focussed results.

As to evaluating sources, student should be taught to pay attention to the primary domain, the web address stem (.com, . org, .edu, .gov, etc) to learn where the information is coming from.  They should also be taught the importance of crosschecking there information from multiple sources, including nonelectronic sources.

One problem that students at my school (and no doubt at others) encounter is that their web-searches are restricted.  You'd think this wouldn't be a problem, but lots of useful information is blocked along with material that is meant to be blocked.  For example, students can't watch MIT OCW videos because they are hosted through Youtube.  The school blocks Youtube sites for students.  That policy needs to change.