Class Notes: Introducing the Internet

Image from Fernando Arconada's Flickr Stream. Also, I love behold.cc. It makes it so much easier to find images online that you can use without worrying about copyright. Thanks Creative Commons licenses and the people who apply them to their work!

Ok, enough about that...

Today's class was on the internet, internet history and a brief lesson on breaking down URLs and what they tell you about the webpages and even organization.

This lesson is probably the best lesson out of our section on the Internet. We try to cram a lot of information into a 5 day unit that also includes media literacy. This lesson is chock full of vocabulary like ISP, web site, webpage, URL, ARPANET, internet, etc. This time I had the kids practice their typing skills, or keyboarding skills, at the end of the lesson which worked a lot better than when I have it was the beginning. I did not feel so rushed and the kids had time to complete their worksheets before the end of class. Also, I am not becoming notorious for keeping the kids after the imaginary bell rings. We don't have bells on campus so kids and teachers just need to watch the clock. Usually, at the end of class, I'm writing a bunch of "please excuse their tardy" notes to my students' teachers.

This lesson, I also used one of the Brain Pop videos to reinforce what I had just talked about. Brain Pop looks like it might be too young for our middle schoolers but honestly, they love it and the quizzes and activities at the end of each video works pretty well at reinforcing the lectures. If your school does not have it, you might share it with them. One of our science teachers introduced it to us and the Science department as well as my class utilizes it. There are some things that I cannot explain very well and Brain Pop does a pretty good and fun job in presenting that information.

Pluses for today include - not being behind in our lessons, giving kids enough time to work and ask questions, a time to reflect and reinforce the lesson through a fairly engaging tool and also, getting the kids out on time!