wiki quest

Wikis are not as easy to use as blogs. My attempts to analyze why I felt frustration at setting up my wiki account and creating a page, stemmed from the fact when I first heard the term wiki in my ICT teacher development course I immediately thought of Wikipedia; the online encyclopedia. I wondered whether I, with my limited experience was expected to create a webpage like Wikipedia. The nervousness I felt was because I was outside my comfort zone. This discomfort led my to reflect on my own attitude to technology, and how it has impacted on my professional development. I have to admit, I have not been a frequent user of digital technology, the most basic; my cell phone is used on a need to use basis. I check and send emails infrequently, I use the computer mainly for its word processing application; mainly to type assignments, mid and end of term exams and write recommendations for students. I do not have a profile on Face Book, nor do I surf the Internet often. I recognize I have deprived myself and my students of exciting modes of teaching and learning experiences, that has the potential to revolutionize my curriculum delivery. My engagement and fascination with digital technology has opened my eyes to why many of my students are disenchanted with traditional text based literacy.

Media technology offers instant gratification. Decoding is made simple by visuals, graphics, hyper-links, and other navigational tools that make the learning experience far more interactive and interesting. I realize it is important for educators to embrace the multi-digital literacy experiences students come to the classroom with, or we as educators will become as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Blogs revisited

I have wondered for quite some time how to transfer the enthusiasm my students share with Facebook to a real book. Now I realize it is not a transplant that is required , but a life line. I have observed my adolescent students speaking excitedly about face-booking, and how many friends they have on Facebook. When I questioned them about their frequency of use of Face book, their collective daily average was forty-five minutes. Homework is rarely done by many of these students, and in fact, many of them are alliterate, yet they spend extended periods of their leisure time engaged in the same activities I struggle to get them to do in the classroom. My introduction to Blogs is the life line I have been seeking. Engaging struggling and alliterate readers can be done through the use of blogs. Blogs are easy to use, they have the potential to promote literacy and dialog.

Blogs give students the same sense of community they enjoy on Facebook, this is especially important for struggling readers. Gunning (2006) agrees that "low achieving readers also need a sense of community. By being accepted and valued in the classroom and in reading and writing groups, low-achieving readers are motivated to try harder."(p. 19) Blogs can aid in all aspects of literacy development, it can also facilitate social collaboration. Students who never had a 'voice' in the class, can freely communicate with teachers and peers by blogging. Students are afforded the opportunity to be creative when blogging, while they engage in the process of reading and writing. I am particularly interested in using blogs to engage my male literature students in actually reading their literature texts. I hope to engage them in discussion of the text, and have them find ways to analyze thematic, character, structural and 'book to self issues'. Since social networking is already a part of the lives of our student, then as educators we need to use all tools available to us to help students acquire the literacy skills the need to succeed in and out of school. My investigations have taken me into literature teaching strategies using a computer virtual world with 3-dimensional characters to bring literature text alive.

As a new inductee into digital collaboration and social interaction as teaching and learning tools, I am concerned by the assumptions we make as educators. We all assume our students, our schools, our curricula and our policy makers have caught up with the need to integrate technology in educational pedagogy. It would seem with all I have been exposed to recently, there is a need to make some drastic changes in our educational system, or else we will eternally be playing catch-up. Many of our schools are without Internet access, we have antiquated equipment and too few computers.