netTrekker Blog

Snowy Days

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a great snowfall, or had a white Christmas. I loved snow days growing up, building snowmen and igloos (which I really did try to sleep in one night), snow angels, sledding, snowball fights, and then the nice warm hot chocolate with marshmallows overflowing. Those were the best days!

Living in coastal Florida, I don’t believe I’ll be seeing a lot of snow anytime soon. I haven’t had much luck in making it to a snowy place either. Every time I get there, the snow melts and starts back up when I leave. But snowflakes can still be apart of my life, and classroom lessons, this season. With netTrekker d.i., snow can “warmly” be part of your sponge activities and lessons for the remaining few days before winter break. Let me share with you my discoveries.

I started my search in Elementary and decided to look up “snowman” and refined my search for interactive media. It took me some time to get back to this post as I practiced my mouse skills while building a snowman. Next, I searched Middle School for “snowflake” and then used the refinement menu to narrow my search for interactive games. There are two websites which help you to create your own snowflakes, without any of the cold.  My last stop was high school, where I did a search for snow. Again, my trusty refinement menu came in handy as I narrowed my searches down by subject. I used Language Arts and Writing and Grammar as my refinement selection and found a lesson plan from the New York Times for students to write riddles about their favorite season. I tried my hand at a few, then went back to the snowflake site to illustrate.

Did you do a winter search in netTrekker d.i.? Care to share with us one of your great finds and how you plan to use those sites in your classroom? Just leave a comment below!

(Image citation: Irish, kelley. dsc00265.jpg. 2008. Pics4Learning. 15 Dec 2008 http://pics.tech4learning.com)

Tags: integration, netTrekker d.i., Pics4Learning, refinement menu, snow, winter

Research Review

We’ve been noticing great postings out there about netTrekker d.i. on various blogs. I’ve done a little digging on some recent postings and it looks like the blogs are coming from students at La Conner School District in Washington State. I have yet located the teacher’s blog with the assignment, but the students have done a fantastic job of detailing their research results and strategies.

Here are a few of the links for you to check out:
• http://fohnjared.blogspot.com/
• http://zoriak.blogspot.com/
• http://classworklc.blogspot.com/
• http://guitarhero2012.blogspot.com/

I love how these students took to the time to compare and contrast the features of netTrekker d.i. and Google. We know Google is a great search engine, but when you’re working in a school setting, time is of the essence, and you need to reach students with different needs. netTrekker d.i. clearly triumphs according to these students! They mention the readability, the dictionary hot key, and the website ratings. Here’s a quote from the first blog:

“I think that Nettrekker is the better search engine over Google. Google might come up with more results but Nettrekker is better because it helps you narrow your results and it gives you ratings which help you to find better sites faster. Nettrekker was the site that returned more relevant information to me than Google did. Nettrekker is way easier to use because you are in a more refined site and you aren’t out on the World Wide Web. I tried all the things suggested like the dictionary and the subject headings and they prove that Nettrekker is better than Google because it helps you to refine your research and find more relevant information.”

What a great quote, especially from a student!

My Portfolio within netTrekker d.i. provides a great way to record your  research information. Remember those index cards that we all used for each resource with the details from each periodical, including notes to use in our paper? I always lost mine. With netTrekker d.i., if you find a website that you want to use as a resource, you can save it to My Portfolio. The default setting includes the date you saved the search. You’ll now have this information for your bibliography. Then once in the My Portfolio area, you can edit each website and change the description with your notes. (This description will only be seen by you.) You can also add a template and add all sorts of information there, including a note to yourself of what type of information you are still looking for, printed resource information you are using such as a journal or periodical, or even a rough draft of your paper.

Look for our upcoming series, 5 Days of My Portfolio in January. This blog collection will definitely be of use to the teachers creating project based learning units and to students conducting research.

And to the teacher of these fine students, thank you! Keep up the great work. If you don’t mind, I’d love to interview you for a future blog on how you are using netTrekker d.i. Please e-mail me your contact information.

If you are using netTrekker d.i. with your students, leave a comment below telling us how.

Tags: My Portfolio, netTrekker d.i., research

A Byte of News

Did you know that netTrekker d.i. publishes a newsletter every two months with great articles about how to use netTrekker d.i., implementation tips, and news from our partners? If you haven’t already, you can subscribe here.

Our last newsletter was published and sent out earlier this month. You can check the archives for any newsletter you missed.

Tags: netTrekker d.i., newsletter