online4me

Sseeion 12: The Educator's Guide to the Read/Write Web

Session 12:  The Educator?s Guide to the Read/Write Web

Over the last few years, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, and other similar tools has changed the world of journalism, politics, business, and other areas of society.  Classrooms are feeling the effects, as thousands of teachers and students use the Web to publish their work, collaborate on projects, and engage in online conversations. (Richardson, 24)  Weblogs also referred to as blogs allow anyone to create a personal or group Web site without needing to learn hypertext markup language.  The only requirement to share with the world is to log in, enter text into the screen, and publish.    Blogs allow online conversations among users and allow any visitor to post public comments.  Many youth treat blogs as online diaries.  Students and teachers use them as a means to draw out critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.  Teachers use blogs to construct classroom resource entries and to promote online learning communities.  The author teaches at Hunterdon High School in Flemington, New Jersey and he has his students using blogs to collaborate with authors of books they are reading in literature classes to contact professional mentors in journalism classes and to communicate with high schoolers from Krakow, Poland as part of a unit on the Holocaust.

Another Read/Write is the Wiki.  A Wiki is a Web site that anyone can edit at any time.  The most obvious example of the wiki potential is through Wikipedia.org the online encyclopedia with more than 500,000 entries.  Every entry is frequently shaped by anonymous donors who log on to the encyclopedia and add new helpful information as the new arises.  Thousand of people  with no connection to each other connect in the work of negotiating and creating this accurate online resource by editing, deleting, or restoring its content.(Richardson, 25)  The community of people using wiki keeps the information accurate by policing itself.  If anyone enters incorrect information or vandalizes the site, another user usually repairs the damage.  Teachers and students in classes are collaboratively building their own wikis that feature lists annotated resources and links relevant to the course curriculum that can be shared with future classes. 

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is another new digital tool.  RSS enables people to subscribe to various feeds of information by help of a tool called an aggregator.  RSS aggregators check this information stream as regularly as every hour to see if there is anything new for RSS subscribers to read whenever time permits.  If there is something new, the aggregator copies and stores it.  The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal now offer RSS feeds for their content.    So that new information about a topic is automatically collected in the aggregator, teachers and students use this new way of collecting information to expand the scope of their reading and research.  For example, a student doing a project on global warming can create RSS feeds that will research on the topic almost as soon as it is published. 

Another way to share information on the Web is podcasting which can best be described as creating amateur home radio programs and widely distributing them on the Web. (Richardson 25)Students across the US are podcasting audio tours of local museums and points of interest, weekly news programs about their classrooms, oral histories and more. 

One of the ways I plan to incorporate podcasting into my classroom is by allowing my students to choose a podcast of their liking (exa. Obama uses podcasts on a daily basis- http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/) with my approval and have the students listen to its contents daily reporting to the class every Friday about their findings and how they can use this information at a later date.  I also plan to use blogs in the classroom by posting a blog as it relates to the objective we are studying and have each student post a blog to explain what this objective means to me.  We will start out slow and gradually grow.

Posted at 12:33AM Dec 01, 2006 by dwdixon in General  |  Comments[0]