Evaluating and Identifying Online Resources

For this week’s assignment I was able to identify three different websites that are related to the brain and learning, information processing theory, or problem-solving methods during the learning process. I will give brief descriptions of each site and then comment on the value of the material they contain.

http://brains.org/articles.htm
          This website discusses current brain research and then tries to draw the connection from the research to how it applies in the classroom. This site offers a wealth of articles that give insight into how the brain works.
          For example, there is an article titled Brain Biology http://help4teachers.com/gardening.htm that explains much of what we learned in our reading about electrical charges in the brain and new neurons being developed and lost. It also adds an interesting point about the importance of sleep throughout this process.
          Another article on this website I enjoyed is Why Hands on Tasks are Good http://help4teachers.com/hands.htm. The article discusses two different memory systems in our heads. One is called the semantic memory and the other is the episodic memory. Hands-on learning taps into both of these memory systems to increase learning potential.
          I feel that this website is a great resource. There are many other articles of interest on this website that I will continue to explore in the coming weeks.


http://www.sedl.org/scimath/compass/v03n02/1.html
          Unlike the previous website I described, there is not a wealth of information within this site. However, the article that is posted here did support our reading for this week. For example, this article also pointed out that left-brain and right-brain learning are not generally accepted as true anymore. Brain research has shown how the two sides of the brain must work together.
          The information in the article about multiple intelligences and what a good learning environment looks like was also interesting to me. It reinforced the idea of presenting a variety of ways and opportunities to learn. This is a key point for an instructional designer.

http://www.funderstanding.com/v2/educators/brain-based-learning/
          This article breaks brain research and its influence on education into a list bullet points. The bullet points are easy to read and might make for a good presentation, especially to a group of teachers, but they do not go into much detail. I don't feel like this site will be as helpful to me as I continue in my studies of instructional design.

Blog Assignment: The Doorway to Professional Learning Communities

 The following sites are all sites that I think might be helpful as I continue my career in education and as an Instructional Designer. Some of the sites are from the Supplemental Resource List, but some are from the course readings or my own independent search. I will give a brief description of what I believe the usefulness of each site is and how I plan on using each site as a continue my career.


http://www.iddblog.org//
The instructional design and development blog will be a useful site that will help spark ideas on how I might incorporate technology into my career, the classroom, and in my daily life. The site is helpful because it seems to have a large amount of information that is broken into manageable pieces. The Search tool is also very helpful. I feel that as I continue learning the tools of an Instructional Designer I will be able to contribute my responses to some of the posts I find on this site.

http://en.wordpress.com/tag/instructional-design
I found the wordpress site helpful as well, but it took a little more work on my end to find what I thought was useful information. It is great that this site pulls a ton of different Instructional Design blogs together in one place, but this also makes the user do a lot of sifting to find what they need. It did seem like a lot of the blogs dealt with Instructional Design coursework. This might be helpful, since I will be going through some of the same struggles.


http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/
I love this site! I was an elementary school teacher for 5 years, and now I work for an educational publishing company. I can see myself using this site frequently in order to stay current on what is happening in schools. What are the issues that teachers are facing? How can I help them given my current role?


http://ideas.blogs.com/
The author of IDEAS is obviously someone with a lot of experience in instructional design that I can learn from. I clicked through some of the material linked to this site and found many useful topics. I watched a presentation on Instructional Design that the author created. I imagine I can use this site as a resource to learn more about how Instructional Design is shaping our world.