Web Site Evaluation

There are 22 students in my fifth grade class, 10 boys and 12 girls. Most of the students are 9 – 10 years old. They are coded as ESL students, receiving all of their instruction in English; the rest of the group is classified as a Bilingual Transitional Class and they receive all of their instruction in English as well. Three of the students are in the TAG program, four are in the Advanced Math program, five immigrant children struggling to read are in the Accelerated Reading program, and the rest are average students, which are reinforced with after school activities and tutoring. In the technology area, all of the students can log in the computer, create a Word document, save files, and access the Internet Explorer. Unsupervised, they would rather navigate to Cool Math.Com or Inventivekids.Com and play games. They all have a functional knowledge of the keyboard, but are not proficient in typing. Most of them use two – four fingers on the keyboard, instead of ten. Although they are all familiar with the concept of searching for information in the Media Center using books, Encyclopedias, and Atlas, they have not experienced a search for a specific topic using the Internet. The students responded positively to the lessons that have been prepared using presentation station and my visual cues. They are auditory learners, often doing something else while the lesson is in progress, but they respond quickly and accurately to the evaluation questions. All of students can sit and do about 20 – 30 minutes of paper and pencil, but after that, they all get restless. This is when the behavior problems begin. The LEP students still have several vocabulary-related questions and I continuously try to compensate for the lack of background knowledge. All of the students are kinesthetic learners, preferring to use concrete materials to just reading about it, and the students continuously are interacting among themselves.