Week 10 - Evaluating Websites

Smolin and Lawless's collaborative work brings us the article Becoming Literate in the Technological Age: New Responsibilities and Tools for Teachers.  The article kicks off by giving the reader perspective based on the scenarios of two pseudo-named teachers. The first teacher uses computers for building spelling in text and skill based instruction, where the second teachers has bilingual students and uses technologies to build communication and community skills by developing intervene questions and recording bilingual community members.   The writers stress the difference and their preference to the second teacher's technique.  By having students develop interview questions and utilize technologies in meaningful collaborative ways she is utilizing a student centered approach to focus on multiple forms of literacy.  These students will not only learn about reading, writing, spelling, etc, but they will learn how to communicate via emails, how to utilize cameras, upload and edit media data, and much more.  What I like best is that the skills students are taught to use with technology are not taught out of context, they are integrated in meaningful ways within the larger goal of a classroom lesson and topic as well as the idea of the work being in groups causing it the be collaborative.   The teacher also helps to instruct students how to effectively analysis and critique the information found from sources on the internet as well as limiting and monitoring their online surfing by using kid friendly and safe search engines.   The article stresses the shift in teacher's roles and the importance of teaching students how to use tools and technologies in meaningful ways, typical to everyday life use.  The article also offers a plethora of information and resources for teachers to include in their technological ventures for fostering growth in the multiple-literacies of their students.

In the second article Lawless collaborates again, this time with Schrader and Mayall, the title of this article is Acquisition of Information Online: Knowledge, Navigation and Learning Outcomes.  This research project states information on the vastness of the internet, as well as the dependency of youth's use of it.  The importance of building navigation skills and critical choice making on the web are increasing for classroom teachers.  The authors indicate that building a strong prior knowledge for students to build from when utilizing the internet will help them make wiser navigation choices online.   They test their theory that a pre-reading activity to build prior knowledge will effect navigation choices as well as the amount of information acquired online for students.  To make a very long research project and report short, the pre-reading activity did make a significant enough difference to call it useful in impacting student's web surfing.