Sunday, February 4, 2007

mission: websites

I was on a mission to find the best or the most useful websites dealing with the Presidents of the United States. So I started my search. I used Google to do my searching and typed in "presidents" and the very first website that I went to I loved.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/
This website is directly linked to
http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/presidents/
Which is meant to be used with students to learn more about the presidency.
There were a couple of other websites that I looked at, but they did not grab my attention as much as these websites did, they were arranged differently, and did not have as much information or activities. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/ This website I checked out and I could not look it up on http://www.easywhois.com/ and I could not find out anything about the website. But, looking at the website, there is a logo of "Oriental Rugs, Bostonrug.com" which did not make much since to me as to why a rug company was writing and reporting about the Presidents of the United States was weird to me. Another website that I checked out was http://www.ibiblio.org/lia/president/ and this one is from North Carolina University and this website was not very good according to my standards. There was not a lot of information, or activities at all. It seemed to me poorly put together.
These websites have been updated lately. I knew from simply looking at the website that it was a government website.
I believe that I could use these websites to teach students about the Presidents as well as the White House. They have a lot of information in them, as well as many fun activities, which I believe is crucial. They have videos of different rooms in the White House as well as photos, quizzes and other important facts of each President. These websites could be used in multiple ways, for instance as homework to go through and find facts by themselves, or with parents. Also, when students are done early you could have them search through the websites and find interesting facts. Plus, they have a "Today in Presidential History" link, that tells you what happened during a Presidents Administration. So for today (Feb. 4, 1789) George Washing became the first president.
While searching I did not modify my search techniques a whole lot. I felt that I was however more critical and more aware of certain issues, like that of updating and what links are connected to the website, but all in all searching with Google, I did nothing differently. I typed in "presidents" instead of typing in presidents.

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