Last week, we visited Burns Park Elementary to observe the school media center and discuss professional development. During this observation, we were allowed to interact with the students during their lesson, which included image searching on two sites that were new to me: pics for learning and kid pics. I was really unimpressed by both search engines. One of the students I worked with unintentionally searched google images for her first picture of an eye and instantly found a million results that she wanted to use. However, after her classmates and I reminded her that the assignment called for students to use another search engine, she tried the prescribed sites and could not find anything relevant and unique. There were even a significant number of questionably appropriate images that were totally unrelated to the search term. It made me wonder why those search engines were chosen over google.
Overall, it was really nice to visit such a long-standing school media program. Rachel has obviously developed a program that is important to Burns Park Elementary and also had a lot of advice to share with us as well during our conversations.
Speaking of our conversations, I am really glad that we were able to air out all of our questions and concerns regarding professional development and the state of the profession as a whole.
I was unimpressed by the search tools, too. One boy I was helping searched for eyes and got one result--an elephant eye. Wow, that's helpful--not.
ReplyDeleteFunny how we sometimes use things that we think are "safer" than Google...when in reality, they may not be. Is it just because they AREN'T Google that folks think they're "safer?"
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