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(More customer reviews)I recommend this book to teachers who are "afraid" of technology and its ever-changing facets. Our students come to school and sit in classrooms where teachers who do not know a lot about RSS, blogs, wikis, and online social networking outside the realm of Facebook or MySpace. We teach the same old ways and balk at new methods while our students yawn or secretly text at their desks.
This particular book helps teachers explore the parts of computer and Internet technology that can enrich the lives of their students by presenting content in a context/format that their charges understand. This book can help teachers step up to the challenges of using technology to teach, helping students who do not have a lot of online opportunities, and meeting students halfway in the learning continuum by using the platforms they know so well. There are many ways to get derailed when teachers have very limited time to evaluate the world wide web, but this book is like an Internet Road Atlas. If you know how to check your email, attach a document to a message and send it to somebody--and you have an open mind to explore possibilities, try this book. After you explore on your own, go to school with a list of safe sites you could use in your classroom and start a conversation with your IT coordinators so that your students can discover the positive, thought-provoking facets of the Internet.
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iWrite: Using Blogs, Wikis, and Digital Stories in the English Classroom"It's not that our students aren't reading and writing, but that where and what they are reading and writing is off the school radar. We can build a bridge between the literate lives of our students outside of school and the literacies we want to teach them." --Dana J. Wilber The power of Dana Wilber's insight is in its simplicity. Students are texting, networking, and blogging- i.e., writing and reading- all the time, everywhere, just maybe in places we aren't necessarily paying attention to. Build on their authentic interest and motivation using the technologies they are already committed to and you've won half the battle. You won't believe how engaged they are; they won't believe they're learning for school. In iWrite, Dana shows you how to guide students through the complexity of new literacies, including: how to discern between media how to account for audience and voice how to choose appropriate genre and how to harness what they already know to be more successful in school. Dana deftly elucidates the lives of Millennials, those students growing up around the turn of the 21st century, and the technologies embedded into their everyday reading and writing. She shows us how three accessible tools-wikis, blogs, and digital storytelling -can be used to scaffold learning for our students. And she demonstrates how they can help us address 10 key issues in the literacies of today's students:
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