Inquiry Based Learning
The internet enables students, teachers and districts to facilitate learning by employing a number of inquiry based learning method. Through webquest and treasure hunts student can seek out information, that you want them to know, by creating a plan for students to follow and eliminating excess information that can overload students as they search the internet. Teachers can employ webquest or treasure hunts to actively engage student in the learning process. Incorporating these projects into curriculum and into class discussions can help foster motivation an interest in subject materials. As well, inquiry based methods are a great way to promote collaborative learning or cooperative projects.

Collaborative Project
Creating a chapter in an electronic book is a lengthy but interesting process. I enjoyed my adventure creating the chapter on virtual field trips. While creating this chapter I learned a lot more about virtual field trip and what they entail, creating them as well as ways in which to implement them.
Virtual field trips are a great way to introduce curriculum topics through out all disciplines and academic levels. In addition, virtual field trips increase student motivation and provide avenues for authentic and collaborative learning. There is a considerable amount of information available via the internet. A virtual field trip allows educators to filter the material available on the web, and capture the essence of information that pertains to their content.
In addition, working collaborative via a wiki website provided an excellent medium in which to communicate and collaborate with my group partners. Although we all had individual target areas in which to work on, we were able to add information or change style layouts on the pages of our group partners. Wiki is a fantastic tool which I plan to encourage and implement in my teaching career. I had the opportunity to experience creating pages in both http://www.pbwiki.com and http://www.wikispaces.com . Through my experiences with both sites, I find that http://www.wikispaces.com provided tools that allowed for easy layout and design. However, creating a layout with http://www.pbwiki.com was a bit more difficult for me due to the HTML. Like everything, each has advantages and disadvantage

Segovia Spain

Fiestas Junio 2006
San Juan y San Pedro

The Wonderful World of Technology
Wiki…nothing to do with Hawaii

Wiki is an online collaborative workplace. You can work in wiki by yourself, with a partner or with the entire world. There are several different wiki hosts. I dabbled with pbwiki.com and wikispaces.com. Although easy, I was at first intimidated by the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) in which pbwiki.com was edited. My intimidation turned to being intrigue…was I actually understanding all that HTML gibberish? I think so...at least a little bit anyway. Wikispace.com had a bit of a different setup in regards to editing the pages still simply simple. I found that with the wiki loading files was a lot easier and faster then my web host angelfire.com. However, I like the freedom and creativity that angelfire.com allows by creating pages in Microsoft Word and then uploading them via FTP (which I find is not always effective, nor efficient).

I think wiki is a great, fast and efficient, way to create a class homepage with an interactive and collaborative learning environment. Students can post their own web page as well as work with classmates on projects when they are away from school. Students can even create projects with students from other schools around the world.

Wiki is not only for creating and editing but it is for exploration as well. While I was exploring all the benefits of wiki, I discovered a wealth of resources in the form of wiki books. These wiki books cover a wide variety of topics even foreign language. If you are interested in learning Spanish check at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Spanish .

I created a wiki at: http://www.senoraespanola.wikispances.com
This wiki is dedicated to Spanish language acquisition and cultural enrichment. After I created this wiki, I said to my self…hummm… now what? So I decided to send a link to my good friend in Albany. She, like me, is a Spanish teacher. I encouraged her to use the resources I had posted and to add resources that she would like to share. I guess we will see what happens.

I created another wiki at http://www.baprilfresh.pbwiki.com
You will able to find this post there as well as in my blog.