Luke+Hosler

1181052745

Luke Hosler
(lukeh03@ku.edu)I'm from Valley Falls, KS. which is a small town about 40 miles north of Lawrence. I want to teach high school history/government. Hopefully I have one more year of school and then enter the student teaching program. I would like to teach in a small school for the fact that I am from a small town, but I am open to almost anything. My technology level is low to medium. I can use most of the technology of today but not to its full capability. I do believe that technology is important in the classroom because everyone has to use technology in everyday life and jobs. So students need to be able to use it and also technology can help make the teacher's job easier. One technology I would like to learn more about is making web pages that I could use in my classroom that could be accessed by my students and their parents. This would help bring the classroom home for the students and let the parents see what is going and make it easier to contact me. A horror story I have with technology in a classroom was in a mapping class. We had to use this program on the computer to map out different map projections. The teacher thought he had the instructions right but didn't and it ended up taking hours to try figure out what went wrong and how to fix. The main problem probably wasn't the program but the teacher and the lack of knowing how to use the program and telling us the wrong things.

Web Exemplar
http://www.columbusnavigation.com/ This website is a good website to use for high school students because it gives a lot of information to the student and can be found easily. The website doesn't just talk about his journey but also technology he used to get to the Americas. A student can easily find the information they want using the links and not have to look through tons of junk. The website is easy to navigate and doesn't have a lot of useless pictures and advertisements to get the student off subject. The information on the website seems reliable because at the bottom fo the front page there is a link showing all the awards it has recieved and some outside reviews of the website. The website is easy to find also. I just went to google and searched Christopher Columbus and it was one of the first websites to be shown. The website is easy to find and easy to navigate through to find information. The design of the website makes it easy to use and yet is not bland and boring to look at. http://gardenofpraise.com/ibdcolum.htm This website is a bad website to use for high school students because it is setup poorly and doesn't give good indepth information that is important to high school students. The information is quick and has no quick links to find exactly what you want. You have to read through the entire thing to find what you want. Also in the middle of the page there is a cartoon-like picture of a boat and a island. I don't know the reason for this and it is kind of annoying to me. The website is just a highlight of events and gives no insight to anything. It isn't designed well, with advertisements around the picture of Columbus. You see advertisements before you see any information. Also, I don't see the need for a google search bar to be right under the picture of Columbus. To find the website I searched Christopher Columbus and had to go through 3 pages of sites to find it. It is not extremely hard to find but isn't not as easy as the website before. The website is poorly designed and seems to try to get you to go somewhere else and not look at this page.
 * GOOD**
 * BAD**

6/7/07-Web Exemplars-Luke Hosler
I agree with what Jacob had to say about his good and bad websites. The bad website was to bland and hard to navigate. It has good information but is useless because you can't get to it easily. The good website was easy to navigate but they needed to move the links to somewhere that is easier to see. I think he made great choices on what websites to use and explained his reasoning very well. When looking at websites it is important to see if you can move around in them easily and if the information is not overshadowed by other items that are off the subject. Pictures and other things can help but should not be overly excessive. Also, it is important that the information is reliable.

WIKI
http://www.kerc-ks.org/Benchmark_ind_list.aspx?stan_con_grade_id=14445&con_id=30&grade_no=HS&stan_id=4328