Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Books I'm reading

Only a few more days till we are back at school. I've been reading a few books for inspiration for my class. The first is a book by Anastiasia Goocstein "Totally Wired, What teens and tweens are really doing online" This is a good book to help get inside the heads of our students and how the relate and interact with the technology around them. One interesting anecdote was the story told about the web site MySpace. Frances Harris a librarian at University Laboratoy High School in Urbana, Illinois recounts how a student wrote a paper on the poet Mary Wollstonecraft and then created a profile for her on MySpace. Soon "Mary" had friends like T. S. Eliot. Students were responding and making comments to "Mary" with blogs of poetry.
This book gives examples of how students are using technology in many interesting, unique, and collaborative ways. I enjoined the read and feel challenged to incorporate some of the ideas in my classroom this year.
I am also reading the book "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools" by Will Richardson. In this book I came across this question Will posed in the first few pages "What needs to change about our curriculum when our students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls? What changes must we make in our teaching as it becomes easier to bring primary sources to our students?
Both of these books are making me rethink my curriculum and the way information will be presented in my classroom. I'm hoping that I can include some or even one of the ideas presented in these books and the blogs I have been reading. But being an immigrant to this digital world and not a native growing up with computers in the home and music on Ipods. I still
have to "translate" to the concept of a classroom that is not bound by the walls of the classroom or a specific period..... time and space.

3 comments:

dfalcon said...

Chan, I hope I can find time to check out this book on Blogs and Podcasts. I am interested in helping students create podcasts in the classroom. Technology is not my forte, so this is a challenge for me!!!
Debbie Falcon

Chan Bliss said...

I'm taking a workshop before school starts on using blogs and podcasts in the classroom. If I there is time during a faculty meeting I will share what I learned.

Chan Bliss said...

Ok workshop update,
very cool and very easy with RWD.

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