Second Meeting with Students

Wednesday, November 14th
I am so enjoying my time with these precious students! I loved seeing the excitement in their faces as they learned new things about the computers with which they were working.  It was amazing to be able to be the person to introduce them to the shortcuts, applications and information that they will need to be successful in our increasingly online and digital world.

I started out by talking with the students about safety when using the internet.  We talked about not opening links that pop-up, pages they are not sure are safe and remembering to always ask an adult before using the computer to search for information.  We also talked about using the computer and Internet to search for accurate information.  One of the students said, "I know something that is important! You cannot believe everything you read on the internet."  I confirmed this to them by talking about how anyone can post things to the Internet and that asking an adult about the validity of a website is usually the best option. Next, we talked about some kid-friendly search engines such as those that were mentioned in this blog post.  After looking at them all and trying some test searches, we determined as a group that kidrex.org was the most user friendly of the sites.  The positive things about it were: it does not have ads, it gives a concise bank of results, which were all kid-friendly, and it was a clean page with a very obvious search bar.

After the tests, and settling on the kidrex.org site as our search engine, we searched for "turkeys".  We clicked on the first link that came up at the top of the page: http://www.kidzone.ws/animals/turkey.htm.  This site was amazing because, right at the top, the author gave permission to use the photos and graphics on the page for educational purposes.  We had found our image bank for the turkey Keynote Presentations they would be doing! I taught them how to save images to the desktop by clicking and dragging.  Then we opened Keynote and they began work on their presentations. They created six slides and proceeded to insert their pictures into the presentation.  They then learned how to title each slide.  We ran out of time but will continue working on the Turkey Project the next time we meet.