I think we can all agree it wasn't so bad that chapter 9 was so short, haha.

But first, let's talk a little about the ELA standards. I think the ABCDT acronym is really helpful! I think that the authority, bias, content, design, and technical elements are pretty easy to teach, because whenever we do research for any reason, we have to determine whether a website is credible enough to use for the research. There are many things that the podcast mentioned, though, that I had not thought of before. For example, I wouldn't think to check the website stability and the links. I probably would have assigned a website or something for students to look at without checking the links, but the podcast explains pretty well the dangers of inappropriate links on a website. Also, I didn't think it mattered whether you outsourced links or typed them in. So I definitely need to look more into how to look deeper into a website's credentials and associations.

I would primarily like to use wikis, web blogs, and other web-based media for my students. Last semester, one of my assignments for my Middle East history class was to edit Wikipedia. It could be anything we wanted--just as long as it was related to what we learned over the whole course. I definitely learned a lot from this assignment and it helped me with my writing. It was hard and time consuming, but a good move on the professor's part, I think. And then, videos, podcasts, and graphics are always helpful for learning too. And posting on blogs like this is a good way to debrief from reading and retain what you've read and learned.

I mainly learned about functions that I didn't know existed with the newsletter assignment. It was pretty easy to figure out, but it was discovering where everything was that took forever. Here is my newsletter! Excuse the fact that Microsoft underlined part of it.