Week 4 Questions

1.  The role of the teacher in helping students make meaning of primary source material?

One of the basic responsibilities of teachers in helping students become technologically literate, is that of teaching them how to critically analyze the source material they use.  While this is a role of teachers regardless whether it is online material or newspapers or journal articles, it does become more important when the material is obtained from the internet.   The ease of push-button publishing makes it more fuzzy to identify true information and editorialized opinions or hidden agendas.

2.  Differences between blogs, wikis and web-based word processors.

Blogs are a way to easily publish material to the web, by using blogging interfaces and templates to make entries.   Blogs can be a form of online journalling, which can either be for the general world-wide audience or a more private group, such as friends and family.  Blogs are a way to easily share information with people of a similiar interest.    Blogs could be used in a classroom setting as an online form of a book club or literature circle, where students could interact with one another about a specific book.

Wikis are a way to collaborate together with others as a form of communication.   I personally get frustrated by the markup language in wikis, mainly because it is so different from html markup code. Because I am (was) fairly fluent in html, wikis were always a bit clumsy because I it felt so awkward from what I was used to.  For example, to make something in bold for a wiki you enclose it in ''' marks, like this:    '''sampe'''     To do that in html, you have to use partnered tags, like this:   <bold>sample</bold>   Of course, this is just my own personal issue and doesn't really mean that wikis are difficult to learn and use.

Wikis could be used in a classroom setting for a place to pubish completed work done by students to share with others in the school or community.  It is a way that the community could be aware of what students are working on.

Web-based word processors create and use documents that are housed in the cloud, which means that they can be accessed anywhere that a person has an internet connection.   One strong advantage to using a web-based word processor is that a student doesn't have to worry about forgetting their document or not having it on their flash drive.  Another advantage is that because many of them save automatically, there is little worry about losing their changes from forgetting to save. Students could use web-based word processors to work on papers andprojects from home and school.  Depending on hte type used, some, like Google Documents, can allow multiple users to access the same document, which can be a terrific benefit when working collaboratively with others.