This website starts off with a series of common questions and answers. The format is a benefit because students can get the answers to questions that they may have about dinosaurs without going through each page separately. Second language learners that may be exploring the idea of questions and answers can see this format in use. The type of activity that the teacher can do is provide a list of questions and students can then explore the websites and find the answers associated with them. Not only would students be practicing their skill to answer questions but they would also benefit by learning more about dinosaurs. The benefits of this website is the simple structure which makes it great for lower leveled students and the pictured time line which uses pictures of dinosaurs to outline the different periods in which they were alive. Because of these pictures and simple worded sentences, this website is great for both English language learners and English proficient learners. Another quality of the website is the easy to locate game associated with dinosaurs and fossils. Games of course bring a benefit of their own because they engage students while fostering learning. These games are even more beneficial for ELL because they are simple worded and involve language as well. In fact on game is a word search so students can learn the association of words with a dinosaur while learning spelling as well! Another aspect of the site is suggestion side bar which gives easy suggestive links to other more interesting subjects such as “fossil mysteries” which explains how fossil are found and where you can go to see them. More importantly, it offers many photos and diagrams for students. Overall, I enjoyed this website and feel it would be very beneficial in the classroom when teaching about dinosaurs.
(evaluated by Jennifer Ramos)
The website “DinoMight”, is an extremely effective website for second language learner children who are learning all about different dinosaurs. The first thing you see when you go to this website is a video called “Dino Movie”, which is a perfect introductory visual to spark children’s interest in learning more about dinosaurs. The video is shown with cartoon drawings and is narrated by the voice of young child, who does a wonderful job of giving a brief yet factual summary of what dinosaurs are and basic characteristics of them. I found that this would be a great resource for second language learners because it provides a simple visual aid that they could use to better understand the information. The website offers four different categories along the top which include timelines, fossils, dinos, and games. Timelines shows you the three periods of times that dinosaurs were on the Earth and gives you a short description of the different climates and different dinosaurs in each period. Fossils, provides another wonderful short video which provides a ton of helpful information about where fossils come from and how people are now able to find them. Dinos has eleven clickable pictures of the main types of dinosaurs and gives a physical description of each and what time period they lived in. These are great visual aids for children to begin recognizing the different types of dinosaurs. The last category provides several different games that are not only fun and entertaining for the children, but allows them to test their knowledge. One particular game that I like is called Name-A-Saurus, which has the child drag each type of dinosaur to their correct name. The first level provides black shadows of the dinosaurs so it’s fairly easy to match them but the next level takes away the shadows and increases the difficulty. This is perfect for challenging them to actually learn what their names are instead of just memorizing the different shapes. For second language learners the shadows can act as a form of scaffolding that provide the children a way to learn them but in a fun way. Overall I think that this is a wonderful website for children of all ages and provides a wide variety of options for learning. It has educational games, videos and visual clickable links that are perfect for engaging second language learner children and allowing them to learn during the process of playing games. Personally I would assign this as a website that the children would be able to explore on their own at school or at home, because it is so easily navigated and has content that is not too advanced for children while they are still learning a language.
(evaluated by Amy Sand)
Kidsdinos.com is a low quality site that provides several resources for children learning about dinosaurs. The several resources that the site provides include a “Dino-Database,” where you can read about specific dinosaurs separated by type (example: “Early Dinosaurs”) and names within that type. Once you pick a dinosaur of your choice, the site provides you with a drawn picture of the dinosaur, where the dinosaur falls on the timeline (Triassic, Jurasic, Cretaceous periods, up until humans), where they would have lived in the world on the “dinosaur map,” a summary of the dinosaurs history and appearance, and then a list of “dinosaur facts” that include how to pronounce the name, what the name means, what did it eat, etc. The “Dino-Database” is quite informational and fairly easy to read and navigate, making it ideal for when students are looking up information.
There is also a section for Dinosaur Games which include the following: Make a Dinosaur; Dinosaur Match; Dinosaur Flashcards; Dinosaur Classification; Dinosaur Memory; Dinosaur Hangman; Dinosaur Mutation and Dinosaur Painter. The first game I investigated was the “make a dinosaur.” You were able as the player to give the dinosaur a name, body type head, back feet, front feet, and tail of your choosing. This game had a lot of potential to be fun and educational, however the graphics of the game were quite small and difficult to see and once you finished the game, nothing really happened so it was anti-climatic. The Dinosaur match game provided several “popular” types of dinosaurs (such as the T-Rex) and has you match the shadow with the dinosaur’s picture. This is most suitable for younger students but really holds very little educational value for older students besides teaching the physical appearance of these five dinosaurs. The dinosaur flashcards provide information on a dinosaur and you must select the correct dinosaur that corresponds with the information. These are handy because they require that students research the dinosaurs using the site’s Dino-Database. The Memory and Hangman games are just like the classic games where you must match pictures from memory and guess letters for a certain dinosaur to make its name. The Dinosaur Mutation game provides the picture of a random dinosaur and information on that dinosaur. You can then click on the dinosaur to “mutate” its appearance, which basically means you stretch the image.
Overall, the site is informational, but very low quality. Ads scatter the page and are placed in inconvenient places, especially in the Dino-Database where there is an ad below the picture of the dinosaur, which originally caused me to think that the database only provided pictures. It wasn’t until I scrolled down past the ad that I discovered all the useful information it had. These ads can be very distracting to students and are an eyesore. Also, many of the graphics in the games are very small and difficult to focus on. However, the graphics in the database where they place the dinosaur on the timeline and map make that information easy to read and process, so that is one of their strengths. It is primarily in the games they provide that their weakness exists.
As for use in the classroom, perhaps activities could be based in computer lab where students have to research dinosaurs and play the flashcards game. Or, perhaps they could each research one dinosaur of their choice and create a small presentation where they describe what era the dinosaur is from, where the dinosaur would have lived, how big the dinosaur was in comparison to humans, and 2-3 fun facts along with a picture (all of which could be found in the dino-database). They would become the “expert” on the dinosaur and they would teach it to the class essentially. Once they do that, they can maybe create their own dinosaur on the make a dinosaur and create information for the dinosaurs they make that are completely different so that it’s fun. For a multi-literacy classroom, this site is probably not preferable. It provides only information in English and the only language assistive thing they have is the phonetic pronunciation of every dinosaurs name in the Dino-Database. The site is definitely not equipped for English Language Learners unless they are at their grade-level of reading and writing (or close to native- speaking). Though this site does provide some good information in the Dino-Database, there are probably better sites out there to use when teaching a class.
(Evaluated by Anne Pugh)
This website has many great dinosaur-related activities for students to complete with the help of their teacher. There are quizzes, fact pages, worksheets, and teacher suggestions to help students understand more about dinosaurs and test their knowledge. Much of the website is quite accessible to students in the higher elementary grades. This site benefits English Language Learners because of the pictures and the headings. The fact pages have quite a bit of text, but the way that it is organized allows ELLs to draw out the main points without necessarily understanding the entire body of text. Each page includes bold headings and main ideas that are in a different color from the other text. Simply reading the headings on most of the pages will allow students to complete most of the games and quizzes that the site contains. A game that is particularly good for English Language Learners is "Real or Make-Believe?" This game shows kids short statements relating to dinosaurs and the student answers whether the statement is real or make-believe. This is a variation of true/false that children will encounter in the classroom, and gives the ELL more vocabulary to express whether a statement is true or false. There is also a writing portion of the site that prompts the children to write what they know about dinosaurs. Because the prompt is not extremely specific, ELLs will be able to complete the writing activity using the vocabulary that they already know since the prompt is essentially must "write what you know."
Overall, the website is a good resource for teachers to use in classrooms with ELLs, but I believe that it is necessary for the instructor to guide the children through the information and activities.
(evaluated by Ashley Milliken)
The website that I found has a lot of informational text about dinosaurs therefore I would use this site with middle school students who are learning how to write research papers. The website has different links to learn about classifications of the dinosaurs, cool facts, and much more which I find to be a strength because a teacher can give a free range assignment and allow the students to explore what they specifically like about the topic. For my class I would make this a research assignment. It would have little structure enabling the students to explore the site. They would have to pick a topic that they found interesting and find out more information about it by using only this websites. After researching using only this site, the students would write a paragraph if they are in the beginning stages of learning how to write papers or if capable they can write a full report on the topic they researched. Like a few activities that we have encountered throughout the semester, it is an important part of an ELL’s education to interact with their peers and for their peers to interact with them. So the conclusion of this activity could be a presentation about why they picked a specific topic and tell the class something interesting about it. This allows the students to use a few of the new vocabulary words they found through their research, forming grammatically correct sentences, it could also work on sequence words. An example of sequence would be: first I clicked on this link and found this, so next I continued to read, and afterwards I found another link, and so on. So with this site an assignment could work on the students writing as well as verbal communication.
(evaluated by Yasmin McKnight)
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