Chapter 1 - The Read/Write Web

As much as I love technology and using technology, I'm an immigrant user in a native user's world. In my eight years of teaching, I've seen many a student use the internet to do many different things. Doing them well, that's a different question. With today's students being raised on the Internet and similar technologies and today's teachers being mostly ignorant of these technologies, there has grown to be a digital divide. As a result, student's aptitudes for learning aren't being addressed by teacher's instructional strategies. To further complicate the issue, new technologies are being developed everyday. Will Richardson introduces several of the newest, most popular technologies, and their application to education. Nowadays, teachers need to be bloggers, wikis, and consumers of RSS feeders. What are these? Well, except for blogging, I don't exactly know. When I do, this will be the first place I announce it. Regardless of what they are, there is a common concern for all technologies, student safety. Of course, these concerns were present when Television his the educational scene. In a world of online predators, fishing, spam, and identity theft, students must be protected from these potential dangers. This responsibility falls primarily on the teacher using the technology. The best way to do this is debatable. So much so that many school systems avoid the debate by banning the use of such technological advances. I guess the question I want answered is, how do you do all this? Learning what something is is easy, learning how to best use it is much more complicated.