Internet Research for TechQuest

Internet Research for TechQuest

Results of Search/Search Engines

I conducted an interview with our Writing Specialist Jill Larkins. She was introduced to Raz-Kids.com in the early 2000’s when she was doing her student teaching with Livonia Public Schools in Livonia, Michigan. When she was hired at our building, the website was one of the first things she suggested that my principal purchase for all grades and all teachers. Mrs. Larkins pulls out students from each class that are extremely below grade level in the subject of Reading. She stated that she has noticed an increase in enthusiasm with reading, as well as increased DRA levels, and various reading fluency/comprehension skills being used since Raz-Kids.com has been implemented. She regularly checks every teacher’s Raz-Kids account to document student achievement. The only students she hasn’t witnessed positives in related to Raz-Kids are those with severe reading disabilities. Raz-Kids.com has a phenomenal website. The website contains tabs for Books, Getting Started, and Teacher Corner. Under Teacher Corner, there are links for Video Library, Training, Summer Material, and Teacher Tips. It also goes into depth how Raz-Kids.com is linked with RtI. Everything is right there for you on the site and easy to navigate. Raz-Kids.com is a branch of Learninga-z.com. Learninga-z.com is a main educational website with various branches including Readinga-z.com, which I use daily to accommodate the various read levels in my classroom, Sciencea-z.com, Reading-Tutors.com, Vocabualrya-z.com, and Writinga-z.com. Apparently, we also have a subscription to Writinga-z.com, but I currently do not utilize that resource. After spending much time on the International Reading Association site with my Reading Specialist, we could not find much on Raz-Kids.com other than the original site and a link to http://www.readinga-z.com/research/index.html. This site provided a tremendous amount of material on the aspects of Readinga-z.com, not so much Raz-Kids.com. On this site it had descriptions, findings, recommendations, citations, and alignment with research for phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, leveled reading, alphabet, preschool, and parental involvement as well as a paper titled “Providing Differentiated Instruction to Meet the Individual Needs of Students,” by Adria F. Klein. By searching Bing.com, I found a review of Raz-Kids.com as well as reviews of many other educational websites. On http://brighthub.com/education/k-12/reviews/32285, Raz-Kids.com received five stars out of five stars on the categories of Online Program, Collection, Cost, and Quality. It was also noted that the majority of people who utilize Raz-Kids.com also utilize a program called Tumble-Books, which is very similar. We just received a subscription to Tumble-Books. The article was dated February 2010. By searching on altavista.com, I came across some data pertaining to Raz-Kids. On www.quantcast.com/raz-kids.com, 89, 545 people in the United States use Raz-Kids.com per month. The majority of those people are female and also use a program called Starfall. We used Starfall my first year at ABT Elementary, but are currently not at this time.

What I Learned

It was astounding how Raz-Kids.com is linked to so many other sites I use or have used in the past. I also learned that Raz-Kids.com is more of a branch-off of Learninga-z.com rather than its own website. There was an incredible amount of information on Learninga-z.com as opposed to just Raz-Kids.com, which was probably due to just that. Using Tumble-Books, Reading-a-z.com, and Writinga-z.com may help the implementation of Raz-kids.com since they are all related and similar. Narrowing my TechQuest project to reading informational text, more specifically in the areas of Science and Social Studies may have been too narrow of a topic??? This may have hindered finding what I was looking for specifically. Next time, I will definitely allot myself more time for research and explore more online educational technology magazines and publications as well as dig deeper for teacher personal experiences.