Week One reading reflection

p. 36 – “Blogging can teach critical reading and writing skills, and it can lead to greater information management skills. It can help students become much more media and information literate by clarifying the choices they make about the content they write about, and it teaches them about how networks function, both human and computer, and it can teach the essential skill of collaboration.”

The profound educational implications of blogging hadn’t hit home for me until reading the February '09 Harper's Magazine this week, where in the index was listed the following statement:
“Number of applications submitted last fall for a $10,000 collegiate “blogging scholarship”: 1,902”

As mentioned in Richardson’s text above, blogging gives students a set of essential tools to survive in the 21st century. There is so much information available online to sift through that knowing where and how to look is the only way one can reasonably make sense of it all. Higher educators are now acknowledging this fact and are encouraging and rewarding interest and skill in using these computer literacy tools. Interestingly, Harper's also pointed out the following fact, revealing the reality of our computer-age, only reinforcing Richardson’s point:

“Number that turned out to be spam: 557”

p.45 - "With younger students, you may want to show what other elementary schools are doing..."

This is something that I talked about with my former mentor teacher (Philip Wakeman at Simpsonville Elementary) and we agreed that it would be beneficial from a number of standpoints. We also talked about using Skype to communicate in real time, bring the diverse communities of Atkinson and Simpsonville together to conference, perhas, on writing. This technology has potential to be very powerful since you see the people you are talking to via a Smartboard. Free software too!