Learners Publishing on the Web

John Zbikowski, UW-Whitewater

Wisconsin State Reading Association Convention
50th Anniversary of WSRA
Celebrating a Golden Legacy in Literacy

Midwest Airlines Center
February 3, 2006


Background Information

Teens and Technology Pew Internet and American Life Study

Teens Creating Content Online Pew Internet and American Life Study

International Reading Association position paper on Integrating Literacy and Technology

Related IRA resources

National Council of Teachers of English resources on multimodal literacies

Popular teen sites could pose safety risk--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Dvorak's Blogging Primer on PCMag.com

Sites where learners already publish (for better or for worse): MySpace.Com, Facebook, Quizilla, AOL AIM Profiles


Ideas

Sample hypertextual document: Oxford University's Isaac Rosenberg page

Sample student-created web pages:

Jay's Shark Page

MidLink Magazine (created with adult support)

ThinkQuest (contest sponsored by Oracle Corporation):

Follow links to "Visit the Library" and "Books and Literature"

Will Richardson's Class weblog on The Secret Life of Bees, as discussed in Kajder and Bull's article in Learning and Leading with Technology

Class E-zine produced by students in Maya Eagleton's study, as described in her articles in Reading Online
 


Resources

HTML Editing: Webmonkey for Kids

Website creation and management tools:

Netscape Composer
Microsoft Office, including FrontPage
Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver

Blogs: 

On public servers:
Blogger.com
MSN Spaces
Blogger templates

For your school's server (examples):
Manila (Commercial; about $1000)
Pico (Open source-small and free)

Free clip art for use in Microsoft Products (requires registration)

weblogg-ed: The read/write Web in the classroom (blog on educational blogs)

Some tools for uploading files to a remote server, where they can be accessed via the Internet (other than the tools built into MS Office and other applications):

WS_FTP Home for Education (client for transferring files, no longer free but still relatively cheap)

Microsoft Web Folders system installed by an IT manager on a server that allows transfer of files from a local Windows computer to the server by use of a drag-and-drop interface

Note: a local computer can be made into a web server, too, but that's usually not allowed for security reasons.

Another method: In Windows, try Start/Run and then type ftp:// followed by the address of the server


Bibliography

Castro, E. (2003). HTML 5 for the World Wide Web. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

Eagleton, M.  (2001, August). Making text come to life on the computer: Toward an understanding of hypermedia literacy. Reading Online, 6(1). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=eagleton2/index.html

Gruber, S. (Ed.) (2000) Weaving a virtual web: Practical approaches to new information technologies.  Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Kajder, S. B. (2003).  The tech-savvy English classroom. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Krug, S. (2000). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to web usability. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

Kajder, S. B., & Bull, G. (2003). Scaffolding for struggling students: Reading and writing with blogs. Learning and leading with technology, 31(2), 32-35.

Nielsen, J., & Tahir, M. (2002.  Homepage usability: 50 websites deconstructed.  Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

Mac Gregor, S. K., & Lou, Y. (2004). Web-based learning: How task scaffolding and web site design support knowledge acquisition.  Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 37, 161-175

Poling, C. (2005). Blog on: Building communication and collaboration for staff and students.  Learning and Leading with Technology, 32(6), 12-15.

Weblogs in education (2004). Technology focus online 2(1). Available: http://www.eddept.wa.edu.au/cmis/eval/downloads/tfo/weblogs.pdf

Wood, J.M. (2004). Literacy online: New tools for struggling readers and writers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.


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