Jeremy Strong
Ed 630
Article assessment #2
The Educator’s Guide to the Read/Write Web
By Will
Overview:
This article focused on the tools on the web that make it possible for students to learn and grow with the technologies that the “read/write web” brings us. With tools such as web blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds and podcasts students become more then just readers and writers they become producers of their own products for the whole world to see. These new tools will allow new avenues of education for both the students and the teachers. The article asks the question, “How should curriculums change now that students have the ability to reach audiences beyond the classroom walls?” With the answer not being as clear as we all had hoped, because this question brings up another very important question, what does it mean to be literate? While being literate 100 years ago meant you were able to read and write, these skills, as core as they are, “will not ensure understanding and meaningful participation in the exchange of ideas online.” The article says that in order to be literate in this new age means “to skillfully manage the flood of information now available.” Students must be able to be able to identify the source of a piece of information, and gauge that sources reputation, compare that information with what’s already known, and make a judgment about it’s authenticity and relevance. The trick for teachers in all of this is how it will become less and less appropriate for teachers to rely on traditional methods of curriculum delivery. The article calls for teachers to rethink their roles from a content area expert to a guide who shows students how work effectively on the web. Although the article preaches about the use of the web as a tool for understanding and curriculum delivery they do give some warnings about what may go wrong with this type of instruction, such as software capabilities, adult comfort levels, and the task of keep students focused. The article ends by saying that the old read-only web changed the way that students learned, worked, and communicated, now this new web will change their lives even more.
Bulleted Reference Points:
- “Hundreds of traditional media outlets like The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal now offer RSS feeds for their content.”
- “Tens of millions of bloggers around the world, many of them high school students, regularly add their ideas and perspectives to the massive body of information that is the Web.”
- “Google regularly scans in information from more then 50 million books from the world’s biggest research libraries, and a new blog is created every two seconds.”
- “The tools of the read/write web facilitate students’ collaborative construction on meaningful knowledge.”
- “The web can also act as a student notebook or portfolio, a searchable respitory capturing evidence of what a student has learned throughout his or her education. This gives students opportunities for important meta cognitive reflection on ther own learning.”
Reflection and significance:
This article gives me a little in site into some tools that are often overlooked in the math world, and makes me think about how I could use some of them. Although I think that by using them it may stray the curriculum delivery from the traditional into the why are we doing this for math class delivery, I believe that it does hold merit in all subjects. The use of these tools could make it real and show students just how big the world of mathematics really is. The internet and its tools will only become more readily available in the future and it is important for both students and teachers to embrace them, if we are to keep moving forward with them.
