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Bookmark It!, digital parenting, homework, parents and technology

Presentations Without the Power Point Hassle — Bookmark It!

Posted on April 6, 2011April 6, 2011 by Marti Weston

Just about every parent knows the experience. A child prepares a great PowerPoint presentation, takes it to school, and then it doesn’t work — for some reason. Maybe it was huge with way too many graphics and did not transfer correctly to a CD or flash drive. Or perhaps your kid made a presentation on a Mac, but glitches occur when the presentation is on a PC?

Solve this problem and explore several ways to refine the whole process — writing, developing, and presenting — on a quality website, and live life without the file transfer hassles. At any number of Web 2.0 presentation sites a user, signs in, creates, works steadily on a project, saves, and can access it again to continue working or presenting as long as a computer is connected to the web.

Discovery Education features a page with four of these presentation tools, including one that allows a user to upload a Powerpoint file to the web and then present it. Discovery provides thumbnail descriptions of Prezi, SlideShare, Picsviewr, and 280Slides along with links to each of the websites. Continue reading “Presentations Without the Power Point Hassle — Bookmark It!” →

great sites for students, homework, parents and technology

Grammar is Fun? Grammar Girl Sure Is – Bookmark It!

Posted on November 30, 2010February 27, 2015 by Marti Weston

Does someone in your house need an occasional grammar review? Do occasional questions about word use or punctuation come up as a family member writes important essays and reports? If so, check out Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. It’s amusing for kids and adults, too, but there’s a lot to learn along the way. We listen to these podcasts just for fun, and I know a family that downloads the “casts” to listen to on family car trips (okay, it’s my family).

Grammar Girl posts regular podcasts — free and never more than a couple of minutes long — and they are chock-full of interesting information about usage, punctuation rules, and accepted practices. She uses humorous examples, not unlike the understated but clever examples found in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, a revered but unpretentious reference first published in 1918 and still widely used today.

Continue reading “Grammar is Fun? Grammar Girl Sure Is – Bookmark It!” →

Back-to-school digital reading, digital parenting, digital world reading habits, homework, parents and technology, research on the web, web research

Digital Reading: How Much Does Your Child Trust Search Links?

Posted on October 31, 2010October 31, 2010 by Marti Weston

If you enjoy this post, check out my August 2010 post about using online databases, Staying Ahead With Online Resources, about online data.

The next time you watch your child begin a web search for a school project or other academic activity, take a few minutes to observe more closely how he or she selects web resources. In Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content (this abstract site leads to a free PDF of the article), professor Eszter Hargittai and colleagues form the Web Use Project at Northwestern University, describe how students tend to place huge amounts of trust in the initial hits retrieved by search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

With first year students in a required writing course at the University of Illinois Chicago (chosen because of its highly diverse student body) researchers conducted a written survey of 1060 students enrolled in the classes. Next researchers selected a stratified random sample of 192 students to observe in person as each student performed 12 specific web-based tasks. Learn more about a stratified random sample.

Interesting Observations

To complete a web-based task, students usually went to a search engine.
After search engines presented links, students tended to follow the first few links, apparently assuming that the first links in a search were reliable resources to pursue.
When they looked at a list of provided links, some had difficulty knowing the difference between regular links and sponsored links.
As they followed these links, students did not appear concerned about who authored the sites that they found (only 10 percent of the students commented about a site’s authors or the credentials presented).
To complete tasks students relied on brand names, and corporate brands dominated.
SparkNotes, an online version of Cliff Notes, dominated.
For credible sources many students favored .gov and .edu sites as more credible sites.
Many expressed trust in .org, because they are all not-for-profit sites, although these days just about anyone can get a .org web address.
To verify information, less than half of the observed students consulted a second website.

digital parenting, great sites for students, homework, Internet Public Library, parents and technology, research on the web, resources to read, teens and technology

Internet Public Library — Bookmark It!

Posted on October 9, 2010February 28, 2015 by Marti Weston

Parents and teachers are always on the hunt for a reliable Internet site that children can visit time after time and be certain of the quality and reliability of the content. The Internet Public Library (ipl2) fits the bill, a resource that is just as good for adults as it is for children. With a motto of “Information You Can Trust” the IPL2 is a searchable, subject-categorized directory of authoritative websites with links to online texts, newspapers, and other resources. Librarians review everything in the collection.

What to Check Out at the Internet Public Library Continue reading “Internet Public Library — Bookmark It!” →

great sites for students, homework, parents and technology, web research

Museums: For Schoolwork, Fun, and Even Travel – Bookmark It!

Posted on September 21, 2010October 9, 2010 by Marti Weston

Summer is over, but your family can still travel virtually to out-of-town museums by visiting one of the web-based museum portals described below. Each leads to a wide range of museums close by and around the world. Some of the sites feature travel information as well as museums.

While it is easy to search for the larger, most well-known museums, these search sites can help people find hidden museum gems. Becoming familiar with these museum portals gives parents and students an additional bonus — museums are great resources for students to use when they work on school reports and projects. Below are four sites that provide hours of fun, not to mention unlimited information. Continue reading “Museums: For Schoolwork, Fun, and Even Travel – Bookmark It!” →

digital parenting, great sites for students, homework, parents and technology

Quick and Easy Graphing Site – Bookmark It!

Posted on September 16, 2010October 9, 2010 by Marti Weston

Have you ever wished you would make a quick graph as you help a child with homework or explain a complex concept by depicting it with a graph?

The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) offers a “Create-a-Graph” site, and more than 20,000,000 users have made graphs since 2005. The site provides a quick getting-started tutorial to help get started, but the graph making is simple enough that a user can get started almost immediately. Graphs can be saved, printed, and e-mailed.

Be sure to check out the other math and statistics facts on the NCES kids’ site.

great sites for students, homework, parents and technology, web research

Evaluating Websites: Be Sure of the Quality

Posted on September 10, 2010February 26, 2015 by Marti Weston

When we were students we learned to write content-filled essays and reports. Our teachers taught us to introduce the important facts, facts we discovered using quality reference materials. With today’s websites a student follows the same rules, but reliability is a significant issue. While it is easy to find sites with information about a topic, identifying reliable and significant information is more of a challenge. The trick is to identify information that indicates whether or not a site is a reliable resource. Do not let your child use a site as a resource unless it is possible to determine its quality.

Many websites look both real and reliable, but they are bogus. A fun website to explore is at based at the Western Australia Province Department of Education. It features bogus websites designed to look accurate and authoritative. Except that they are not accurate or authoritative. Take a few minutes to explore. Better yet, explore them with your children.

Evaluate the Web Sites that You Use

Be sure you use sites with accurate and reliable information. If you have a research project or your child has a homework assignment plan to evaluate each website to ensure its quality. Also please read the following tips describing how to evaluate web-based information.