A week of surprises

This week was full of surprises. The first surprise was a new discovery of the potential of the web search.  It was the first time when I've learned that I can target completely different things by choosing one search engine or another. The task we did opened my eyes to new possibilities and also the recommendations from my mates helped me see that from now on the web is going to be more resourceful and I can use more of it for my work. Also, my mates gave lots of good recommendations on what can be found through these searches and how useful those resources can be for our work. My favorite so far is: uk.ask.com. The site not only gives you Top Answer to your query but also a number of related searches which may guide you to do some further research on the topic of interest to you. Also, the site is very easy to navigate and only the first words of my query produced immediately a serious of hits, again many of them strongly related to the topic under investigation. I am convinced I'll be using this site a lot for any academic reading I'd like to do in the future. We can't go wrong now!


The second surprise was the task we did on learning objectives. When analyzing the reading materials and preparing the task I suddenly discovered how precisely all the proceedings in teaching are regulated and described. For example, the descriptions I found in one of the sources on Bloom's taxonomy determine all the necessary steps that need to be taken for effective teaching situations and they are not necessarily the most attractive tasks. "A lesson plan objective is a clear statement of purpose for the whole lesson that spells out what you want the students to be able to do after the lesson is completed and determines the activities the students engage in. The objective can be either a behavioral objective, which defines what the student can do at the end of the lesson, or a knowledge objective that defines what the student should know at the end of the lesson." The objectives are usually put in a sequence from the easier ones to the more difficult one in order to facilitate the teaching and learning. I'm not sure what my mates feelings are about this, but at this point I get the impression that teaching is one of the crafts.

The third surprise came from the description of my students and the IT media which we have at school. Never before did I realize that the school is so well equipped with IT equipment and that we could organize in it fantastic IT resources based lessons. Here are some places we could use for this:
http://zsb1.poznan.pl/icim/archiwum.html#