Showing posts with label online. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online. Show all posts

September 15 - Google Day AND National Online Learning Day

Posted on September 15, 2018

Thanks to the internet, the world has a LOT of words and phrases, now, that it didn't when I was a kid. For one thing, there's the word internet itself!

Online. Website. YouTube. Social media. Google. Search engine. Blog. Distance learning. 

Those are just a few of the words that and names that have entered our language:
Before you ask a teacher, google your question and see if you can find out on your own. You are much more likely to remember an answer you discovered on your own. 
My friend is a YouTuber who even has sponsors for her vlog.



Today is the anniversary of the registration of the domain google.com! That happened in 1997, so Google turns 21 years old today!

Google is, of course, a search engine that helps people find information and websites on the internet. With about a billion and a half websites on the world wide web today (about 200 million of which are active), there would be no way to enjoy the information age without some method of searching for particular topics or particular specific sites.

Google isn't the only search engine. There's also Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL.com, and some I've never heard of like Wolframalpha.


Online learning usually refers to the use of specifically educational websites and online services. But, actually, everything from Do-It-Yourself videos on YouTube to Wikipedia, from multiplayer video games to online comic books - everything helps us learn something! 

The official website for National Online Learning Day reminds us that online learning is for everybody, from preschoolers to seniors. Even folks in poverty stricken communities can often access computers or smart phones and hook up to WiFi - maybe in libraries or schools. And once hooked up, the possibilities are endless!


Here is a list of "the top" (as in most popular) platforms for online education, aka eLearning. 

And this list is full of more unusual learning sites such as Google Earth Blog, Atlas Obscura, and Instructables.


  

Also on this date:






































HummerBird Celebration in Texas (September 13-16, 2018)






(Third Weekend of September)

(Third Saturday of September)







(Third Saturday of September)






Plan ahead:



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And here are my Pinterest boards for:
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January 15 – Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

Posted on January 15, 2014

I can just imagine someone hatching this idea:
“I know! Instead of having an expert in birds' eggs write an encyclopedia article about birds' eggs, and an expert on dinosaur fossils write about that, and so on, and then having an expert in editing correct the spelling and grammar of all the articles—instead of all those experts, who will want to be paid, let's let anyone at all write and edit articles! And we'll save money, because we won't pay the writers or editors! So all of these articles can be online, and people can read them for free! Great idea, huh? What could possible go wrong?”
I bet a lot of people thought that the idea behind Wikipedia was nuts. I bet some people thought that nobody would bother to write or edit articles. I mean, why would they go through that effort, if they weren't being paid? I bet that some people thought that the articles would be written badly, with tons of misspellings, and that they would be full of misinformation and bias and bad language and silliness.
But the naysayers were wrong. It turns out that Wikipedia, which was started on this date in 2001, works really well!
Volunteers worldwide have written 30 million articles in 287 languages. There are more than 4.4 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone! Wikipedia is now the Internet's largest and most popular reference work, and it is the sixth most popular website of any kind. It can even be considered a news source, because articles are so rapidly updated when there is breaking news.
One time I was watching the CBS crime show The Mentalist, and a show ended with someone whispering a few words. But my husband and I couldn't understand the words he said! My husband rewound a few seconds to listen to the words again and again, but he still couldn't understand them. In the meantime, I had jumped online, found the Wikipedia article about The Mentalist, and was able to report, “He said 'Tyger, tyger'!”
My husband was astonished that the Wikipedia article already reflected the end of an episode that had just finished airing a few minutes ago! But several times since then I have found articles on Wikipedia about earthquakes and other just-now-happened events. These articles have been, in my experience, easier to find and more accurate than articles from other online news sources.
Another thing I like about Wikipedia is that, because there are SOOO many articles, I can find out about obscure things such as Celtic mythology, popular culture and geek culture such as the pro tour of Magic: the Gathering, and even local things such as a popular shopping center.
But...is Wikipedia accurate?
Several studies have found that Wikipedia is as reliable or, in some cases, more reliable than print encyclopedias—even the Encyclopedia Britannica.
To find out more about Wikipedia, check out this and this other earlier posts.

Also on this date:















Anniversary of the coronation of Elizabeth I



Plan ahead!
Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my boards for:



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