Thursday, October 4, 2007

The Educator's Guide to the Read/ Write Web

I. Stacy Naden suga_bb@yahoo.com 10/04/07
The Educator's Guide to the Read/ Write Web Will Richardson

II. Overview of Article
This article is a brief introduction to the tools available on the read/write web. It gives some brief information about weblogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS, or Really Simple Syndication and how these things can be utilized in the classroom. Weblogs enable anyone to create their own personal or group website without needing to learn hypertext markup language. Students can use these blogs to communicate with other students, teachers, and sources of information all over the world. Some other classroom technology tools discussed were wiki, or wikipedia, an information source kept accurate by the users. Really Simple Syndication enables people to subscribe to various feeds of information. Data are continually streamlined and collected into a file with the help of aggregators. Another tool mentioned was pod casting which is creating and broadcasting content that may be listened to at one's leisure.

III. Bulleted Reference Points
  • Weblogs
  • Wikis
  • (RSS) Really Simple Syndication
  • Read/ Write Web
  • Aggregator
  • Professional mentors
  • Information sharing
  • world-wide classroom partnerships
  • Student ownership of work

IV. Reflection and Significance to me

The article's utility to me as a teacher is mostly just good information to have. I recently learned that wikipedia was a resource created by users and regulated by users. I thought the information of wikipedia was more credible than that. Instead, it is kept credible by the users, in which case, it's credibility is in question in my opinion. I didn't know what pod casting was and I have yet to listen to a podcast. I'm still a little unclear on what they consist of. I understand blogging, but I am curious as to the degree of popularity with the kids. The RSS, or really simple syndication is a completely new concept for me, I have never heard of it and even after reading about it, I am still unclear on how it works and what it looks like. I understand that people subscribe to various feeds of information which are streamlined and collected into a file with the help of an aggregator which checks this information stream regularly to see if there's anything new for RSS subscribers to read. I think that it's a new way of collecting information, yet I wonder how much is filtered, and how much is relevant to the subscriber.

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