A Slice of Life

My thoughts on this are simple to say, but might be difficult to into motion. I suggest that you ask your son to do atleast 1/2 of the report the old fashion way and the remainder to use the computer. This will give Him the bibliography that he will need for the report. As far as for accuracy, I have found that checking on "Snopes.com" you can check for accuracy on many subjects.
At the end of a report I always told my Children to make the statement of, "The accuracy in this report is correct to the best of my ability." That was never questioned by any of the teachers in the years that both of my Children wrote any research papers.

**Congratulations to you for your involvment in your Children's education, it is something that you won't regret. As Children appreciate the help even though they don't always say it.

I never allow my kids to use the internet when assigned things like a book report. I make them buy the book and read it from cover to cover. They haven't ever brought home a grade under a "B". I just don't like shortcuts on homework. I also do not allow the use of calculators in my home. Too many people rely on machines to do their work for them.

Claddagh
Dec 4, 2007 | 8:15 PM While it is useful to bounce some things off of bloggers - in this case I feel the best person to ask would be your child's teacher and what is acceptable to the school.

Actually I wasn't looking for inut on my son's project, I was just looking for opinions on homework that involves use of the internet vs books.

Git, That is so true, but our kids are told to use calculators in class, and as for the projects, they were actually given websites to check out for info. I am sure that books are acceptable, but the thing is that when everyone else is taking advantage of the web and other things, that puts kids who do the reading instead at a disadvantage because they need to get so much info in so little time. My son has 7 subtopics that he needs to report on in two weeks. I mean it is cool and he has learned things that we never would have found in books, so I am still torn on what I think.

Got it. Actually, they were givin websites to go to for info.

But even last year at our old school, they were told to google everything. Like I said before, I really don't know what to think. I mean it really isn't a huge deal, and I even learned some things in helping out with this one, but it just feels so weird to me.

Kind of like ordering a pizza. You call (or go online) choose your toppings, and it gets delivered straigt to your door.

On here, you type your word and all of the info gets delivered straight to your screen. Then you write your paper and make your visuals and so on. I guess it's neat.

When my kids were attending Muskego schools (back befor I had a computer~about 10 years ago) the teachers told my kids that they either need to buy a computer, go to a public library, or fail the course...period.

Considering that Muskego has 6 or 8 (I don't remember the number) plasma t.v.s in the cafeteria of the high school, they should have a computer lab in each of the schools for kids to work on such assignments during their lunch hour or free time. Those plasma t.v.s were a slap in the face to the taxpayers in that community. Just another way to show the rest of the state how foolish schools in the suburbs can be.

Not too much, the parents went on a rampage and complained about their monies being spent so foolishly and they made it so that the t.v.s can only be used on certain special school events.

Everything about Muskego is silly...that's why I got the H E L L out of there.

Well just for my two cents . . .
The internet seems to be a lot more specific, you can look up specific dates or times or people and get pages on them. Unfortunately, about 80% of it isn't reliable. So I do use books a lot too. We have a 15 page history paper due and 10 out of the 12 sources we cite in our bibliography have to be books.

(And it is possible to cite internet sources--there's a format for it--url, date accessed, date edited/created, author, etc).

I will say that when I do find a book it's like a pot of gold because of how specific it is--and that's what you need, specific people, places, times, events. So whenever I find those few books that have the information I need in them, it's really satisfying.