Just 30 Minutes

It's been many moons since I have been able to blog, but I'm back for Twenty Thirteen. My new position that took on this fall along with starting my own business has kept me away from sharing my educational technology passion. However, as the job has finally settled, I find it imperative that I get back to keeping up with the Ed Tech world.

In my Technology Lab our new challenge for this year is to take at least 30 minutes a week to learn something new. I myself have chosen to spend at least 30 minutes a day bettering myself by learning a new skill or adding on to the skills I already have. The thing is with students though, the computer is their number one resource for learning and when they get on the computer, they were immediately lost when it came to referencing learning opportunities.

So, I found a site for them that I highly recommend called Great Websites for Kids. This site is sponsored by the Association For Library Service To Children a division of the American Library Association. Great Websites for Kids actually is a safe site aggregate that suggest amazing and stunningly beautiful websites that are astetically pleasing to kids while providing relevant information to both the trending and standard topics that students are interested in from endangered species, to trivial facts about everything all while filled with vivid images interesting creatures like the coconut crab which I had never seen before or heard of in my life.

Great Websites for Kids divides the suggested sites into academic categories: Animals, The Arts, History & Biography, Literature & Languages, Mathematics & Computers, Reference Desk, Sciences, and Social Sciences. This could be a one-stop-shop for students doing research on various topics and keeps them steered clear from unwanted sites that are suggested when searching via Google. They also highlight a website for the week that appears when you first enter the site, bringing notariaty to some very information friendly sites that contain wealth of knowledge but delivered in a way that engages the students. Great Websites for Kids also has a link for Parents, Caregivers, Teachers & Others taking the search challenge away for us adults also when looking for useful information for our kids. I guess this my Website of the Week and I hope that students would at least spend 30 minutes a week accessing it to learn something new.