Simple English
Mar. 3rd, 2009 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
start_to_finishI was talking to another teacher on Friday about the difficulty of teaching searching as a topic to my year 2 class because while you want to teach them to use Google to find information, most of the information they find they won't be able to understand. If they get onto the Wikipedia page for Mexico (our topic), for example, they won't be able to read most of it, especially those at the bottom end of the class.
My suggestion/plan was to write a website that would allow me to create an information site about Mexico with each page having different versions for different reading levels and then a search engine to go with it and teach the principles from that (N.B. this is only possible becausxe it doesn't have to be scaleable!).
In the cold light of day, it suddenly occured to me that I was re-inventing the wheel here. There's no reason to write an engine for this, I can just use a wiki and have the different reading levels as different translations. That way, I also get the search stuff for free and life is much easier.
Even better, I just discovered via XKCD that there is even a Simple English version of wikipedia! It's still rather too much for my year 2 class, but it'd be great for using with year 4 and above just to make their lives easier.
My suggestion/plan was to write a website that would allow me to create an information site about Mexico with each page having different versions for different reading levels and then a search engine to go with it and teach the principles from that (N.B. this is only possible becausxe it doesn't have to be scaleable!).
In the cold light of day, it suddenly occured to me that I was re-inventing the wheel here. There's no reason to write an engine for this, I can just use a wiki and have the different reading levels as different translations. That way, I also get the search stuff for free and life is much easier.
Even better, I just discovered via XKCD that there is even a Simple English version of wikipedia! It's still rather too much for my year 2 class, but it'd be great for using with year 4 and above just to make their lives easier.