Research Using Search Engines

One thing I am very interested in at the moment are Bichon Frises. They are the breed of dog that my puppy Jasmine is. I am going to use my new knowledge of search engines to find some information about them.

Some things I learned that I really did not already know are:

• Bichons are hypoallergenic dogs.
  
• They have a long life expectancy of about 15 years.
  
• All websites describe them as gentle mannered.
  
• Bichons do not shed so they are highly prone to matting in their fur.
• They are extemely sensitive to ticks.
  
• Bichons love children and people in general.
  
• The Bichon breed was once used in circuses so they are very easy to train new tricks to.
  
• The Bichon breed has the ability to walk on its hind legs.
  
• The Bichon is one of the top breeds used in Nursing Homes and Children's Hospitals therapy work.
  
• Bichon's were depicted in royal family photographs from France because they were highly popular in that area.

After learning about different Google search features I have a new outlook on searching for internet data. Before I would type in a bunch of words and usually get back websites that were not of much use to what I was actually searching for. I can now narrow my search using operator tools. I think that the + operator and the "" operator will be most useful to me. The + operator allows me to search without receiving any variations on the word. The "" operator allows me to do the same thing. I also find the ~ operator useful because it allows me to search synonyms of the word I am searching for. Learning about how to evaluate websites also helped me a lot. I now know some things to stay away from when I am conducting research and some better choices that will allow me to find more reliable information.

Affordances and Constraints of RSS readers

Before taking this class I was not aware of RSS readers and I was very interested in them once I started exploring them and using them myself. An advantage of them is that you can subscribe to different blogs or news updates and be able to see them as soon as they are updated in one place without having to click around to visit each site separately. This is especially great for classes that have introduced blogging such as CEP 416 and my TE 448 class, as well as others that I am not a part of. In both we are keeping blogs to post our work and we are expected to look at what others have posted as well. The RSS reader enables us to see when someone has updated and easily allows us to read each post. Without the RSS feed we would all have to click into each blog to see if that person has updated and continue that process until we have read all of the responses. In my opinion that is a waste of time and the RSS reader really allows the most efficient way to read the posts.
One constraint of the RSS reader is that every single update is shown from your subscribed blogs. Not everything will be of interest to you and this may cause you to have to look through a lot of posts to find what you want. For example, if you set up a RSS reader in your classroom for a project on the Civil War, and everyone had separate subtopics within that subject, not everyone will need to same information. The information that is being posted may not be useful to certain students and may put them at a disadvantage to finding sources since other students are able to use the information that they are finding through the RSS reader.

Advantages/Disadvantages of Blogs

Of all the advantages of blogs, I feel that the biggest one is the fact that a person can post what they need to very easily and other people can see this and comment immediately on the post. With a website updates take a little longer and to post comments you almost always need to email the person instead of just leaving it on the page. In a classroom setting, this makes discussion very easy to do outside of the room. It keeps the classroom connected and can cut down the amount of time used within the classroom to hear everyones points of view while still having everyone hear the views of their peers. It also allows for everyones opinions to be heard without making anybody feel uncomfortable stating their views in class.
The biggest disadvantage to a blog is that anybody can have access to your blog and the discussion that is going on. In a classroom setting it may be better to have a private discussion board on some topics so that the wrong people do not get a hold of the conversation, especially if there is a controversial topic being discussed. With your blog available to everyone, this may set up some security issues if full names and locations of your students are available.

CEP 416

Hi ! Welcome to my CEP 416 blog. This class is about technology in the classroom. I'm taking this class because I am very interested in incorporating technology, such as blogs, into my future classroom. Here is a link to our class:
http://416-001.blogspot.com/