Reflection #2: "CDK's Education Technology Place"

Without a doubt, the very first thing that I notice about “CDK’s Education Technology Place” is that amount of YouTube videos on the homepage. I guess the only reason I was slightly surprised by this is because I mostly use YouTube to look up entertaining videos, whether it is music videos or some viral clip. I rarely hear the word “YouTube” and think of an educational website. But with millions and millions of videos, YouTube is definitely a new educational tool. Historical videos, famous speeches, news clips, all of these contribute to a new resource. After this, I was just looking around the site and found another interesting link called “Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day”. His blog is specifically dedicated for teachers of ELL, ESL, and EFL. Although it is specified, I enjoyed looking around it because I think that all teachers will eventually teach a student who may not understand a certain language very well. This blog isn’t just your average, random-person writing, but this guy is an actual scholar who has written books about working with ELL students! Not only that, but he has so many blog post that is seems impossible to not find the thing that you are looking for. On top of that, I really like how his blog includes political posts, personal posts, and helpful posts. In one, I found a link to his best sites for learning about the Holocaust and genocide. Again, just having a place already established to go to for resources really does save time for teachers and helps them add substance to their lessons. I went back to “CDK” homepage and was exploring some more when I found another interesting looking link called “Top 100 Technology Blogs for Teachers”. The education community is always looking out and helping each other and this is just one more example of this. I think this blog looks like the most helpful because I do not even know where I would start if I needed to go look up something about technology and education on my own. On top of that, there are such a variety of sites that it is extremely convenient to have them all in one location.