Customer Reviews

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms

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Note: while there are some spoilers here, I will deliberately LEAVE THINGS OUT so you will have no choice to read his great book. I could not put it down and I learned so much, even though I've been Podcasting since September and Blogging (sort of) for two years.

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson is a great resource for any teacher or instructional technologist who wants to integrate technology into the classroom. Will begins by quoting Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web - the vision was that it was a "read-write web" - with web users not only collecting information but creating it as well. In his book, Will gives many examples of how to do this:

Blogs: great for class portals, an online filing cabinet, e-portfolios... but better: a collaborative space for students and teachers to react to questions and scenarios - all online where Will has arranged for his students to meet authors or students from other schools to discuss a topic. Student writing becomes authentic, relevant. Will recommends that teachers blog themselves before introducing blogs to their students (just like a teacher of writing should be a writer himself, or a reading teacher should read on her own). Will dedicates an entire chapter to "getting started" with blogs - with juicy tips and tricks, as well as resources for new bloggers.

Wikis: after a discussion of the origin of the wiki (wiki-wiki - Hawaiian for "quick") and a discussion of the most well-known wiki, Wikipedia, Will discusses the uses for wikis in school: you can create an online text for your classroom, a lesson plan exchange for teachers, and he gives a good introduction to creating your own wiki using PBWiki.

RSS: OK- this is where my brain began to melt. I was blown away by the difference between what I THOUGHT RSS was good for and all of the ideas that Will has for them. To quote his chapter on RSS: "I think it's the one technology that you should start using today, right now, this minute. And tomorrow, you should teach your students to use it." After reading this chapter I did, and I will. Seriously. This chapter was an epiphany for me.

Podcasts: amateur radio, with lots of possibilities. There are many resources given in his book but the Education Podcast Network is the best known and a great place to start. Will gives some great tips on software to use like Audacity - and how to use Skype to record interviews (using software from http://www.powergramo.com ).

I hate to sound like PBS's Reading Rainbow, but if you want to find out more, you really should buy and read his book. It is very well written, organized, and is an invaluable resource for any teacher willing to try technology in their classroom.

I'm not someone who necessarily "loves" technology, but with so many of my high school students using blogs and just spending so much of their time on the Internet, I decided to get up to speed. This book was recommended to me by friends who had seen the author speak, and I have to say that I'm simply amazed by how well this book lays the groundwork for these technologies and how clearly it points the way to get started. I've decided to start a blog to use as a place to reflect about my teaching, and I'm already looking forward to this fall to try some of the other great ideas in the book. Whatever you do, don't believe the one negative review in this list. This book is aimed at classroom educators who need to start understanding how important the Web is becoming to all of us. It's a great book, one that every single teacher should read.

This book is a mixed bag. The entry blurb says it was published in 2006 but page 112 of this very very short book has the author telling us he expects podcasting to be big in 2005. just as blogs were big in 2004, the year he probably wrote this very very small book.

The book is sometimes useful in giving out some urls so we can look at what others are doing or what is available out there. However, a common problem with all these entry level books is they lack focus and a targeted audience. Is the book for teachers from grade school up to university level? This is an important question as it would dictate what approach to take.

For the hefty price of this book, I got to look at a few new sites. But that happens most days when someone puts me on to a new thread for free. Other than that, I got very little out of it beyond a broad brush approach of what the author is doing, which is relevant to him but not to me or you.

I use Wordpress which gets only passing mention in this shallow book. I was considering buying the Wordpress Quickstart book which comes out at the end of June. But that version is already out of date and the Wordpress site has enough supporting documents to fill a small library. So why either the book when Google is better?

And why buy another geewhizz book, which has one shallow chapter on Flickr ( google it if you don't know what it is, visit the site, save a few photos and you have what is in the Flickr chapter).

Most books like this agree books are going out of fashion. But they keep spewing out over priced books like this. Still the big font was easy on the eyes.

Also, teachers have to generally work to a platform, a curriculum that has been externally set. But the book does not delve into that; instead it goes on about a teacher here and another there doing some seemingly cool things with the kids in their class. Gee whiz.

My verdict: worth skimming through if you find a discarded copy hangiing around.

I've dabbled with blogs and wikis for about a year now, but can honestly say I didn't see why everyone in Educational Technology was getting so excited. Now I understand! Will Richardson quickly turned me into a Read/Write web evangelist! He gives wonderful recommendations for good tools, excellent examples of use and a steady stream of ideas for how to best utilize these POWERFUL tools in classrooms.

The book is a quick read, written by someone with a blog mentality. A chapter might take 20 minutes to read, but the additional, fabulous collection of well-research links takes another two hours to explore!

I am an elementary school teacher who values technology integration in classrooms. Initially, the book begins slow with an overabundant amount of details about the simplicity of blogging. Some advice is given to lead novices in the right direction tailored to their blogging interests.

An aside: As I was searching on the Internet for safe and secure blog sites for young students, I found this website: http://mhetherington.net/blogs/?p=8 which was created by a middle school teacher with similar interests in student technology involvement. It details steps that can lead any teacher into a free (yet time consuming) setup for students to use. (I used this website to create my own blog site for my 32 fourth grade students and it worked marvelously!)

The author then introduced the power of wikis. I really appreciated the real-life accounts from actual educators who use wikis for group projects with students. I did feel a like the examples came mostly from secondary education and did not focus heavily on primary student possibilities with wikis. PB wiki (peanut butter wiki) for educators was explained and the book offered some great resources for teachers on a low budget with wiki interests.

Next, RSS feeds were explained. Although much of the explanations of RSS feeds were still above my head in understanding, I learned a number of values in using RSS feeds with the Web. One of the examples used in the book was that one could subscribe to all RSS feeds in Cyberspace about a topic of interest. If a person is interested in "Global Warming in California," they can subscribe to any place on the Internet that may use those words as an update when stories or writing is produced and submitted on websites you may not know existed. RSS feeding is a promising method of allowing the computer to do the searching for you.

During my reading of this book, I posted two blogs (on blogger.com) about my reflections. Within 3 days of my writing, the author of this book, Will Richardson, posted a comment on my blog thanking me for reading his book. My inferences told me he may have an RSS feed in Cyberspace that brings him news about whenever information is posted about himself or his book. I was impressed by his comment as this showed me he practiced what he preached in his book and really values the technology he promotes.

By the end of the book, podcasting, screencasting, and videos were introduced as well. In all, the book catered more toward novices and technology learners, not experts. Experts may find this book a bit juvenile, while I enjoyed it for its practicality and rapid information. My favorite part of the book stands at the providing of websites and tools that can be searched just seconds after reading about them. I found that using this book as a user's manual was helpful for technology novices on the go.

I'm at the end of my teaching career and feeling envy towards young people who have been in for just a short while. You have "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" and I didn't!! What an amazing agenda Will Richardson lays out, what fantastic uses the internet is capable of, and what yet unimagined ways will be conceived in the future!

I just finished this book--an easy read, an easy-to-follow instruction book, a book of magic, a play book, a cookbook filled with recipes for successful communication, collaboration, connection, and more. You may ask: "Judy, do you like this book?" I would have to answer: "No, I am THRILLED by this book--at the potential for connecting students with immediate and ongoing learning. That's what Richardson shows us, gives examples of. When he cites the old way of individual learning with a test as the measurement and a dead end to that chunk of learning, I nodded. "Oh yes." How many times did I want to show a particular student's special answers. "Look what this student wrote! Isn't it amazing? Isn't she showing Gardner's upper echelon level of synthesizing and evaluating."

So what do blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools do for students and classrooms? They require active learning, collaboration, hooking up with the world at large, expanding consciousness, conscience--all the things that education truly does or should do. We want our children to learn to think for themselves, to think critically (means evaluate both sides), to imagine possibilities for themselves, their families, and their world. The internet and all its component parts do these things. Until I read this book, I did not know how much was "out there" and already being used by thousands and thousands of teachers across the globe.

As a teacher of broadcast journalism for four years (this some four and one-half years ago), with the class producing a weekly 12-minute news and feature cast, I saw then the power of that medium and the use of technology to make it viable. What the internet does is now competing with television and radio for not only informing, but also entertaining its audience. Teachers can use these same principles in teaching. Besides, using the internet is inevitably cheaper than sophisticated cameras and studios and "the talent (the television personality, anchor, or whatever role the lead person has).

Besides innovation, students learn to read critically (must be taught not only critical reading skills but ethics as well), learn how to save, retrieve, and store information, then use it in a multitude of ways. This is the new way of doing things, the new world. Is it better? Yes, infinitely! Teachers and students should not be so isolated in their little boxes, but become part of that HUGE world of information! Do we need all that information? That is a question I will leave for the philosophers. Right now, it is what it is.

Here is an example of a creative use of the internet, yet still retaining basic information. Using the free software program Flickr, a teacher can upload a photograph of a pig's organs, create word boxes connected to various organs, which the student then identifies and explains their functions. Or in music, the student can label parts of a musical score. A literature teacher could assign a photo-image assignment. The student would use his aggregator account to collect a specific poem, then use Flickr to find images that "explain" or interpret the poem. Then put all of this as his completed assigment into his blog account which feeds by RSS into the teacher's account.

It all sounds complicated but I opened up accounts, started subscribing to feeds which are collecting into my aggregator, and soon I will read and synthesize some of the information into my blog. This kind of information gathering and the technology that ushers it is such a high for me, resulting in the creation of such highly creative, energy-driven, imaginative products which truly test a student's knowledge and real-world application.

Then there are wikis. Let's say the fourth grade teacher wants to create a collaborative lesson on modern art. She could assign one artist to a group of two students who then start collecting information about that artist, including images of his work. Typically, they might find something in a reference book which they cannot take from the library. They can photocopy it if they find what they want. On the internet they will find it, especially using subcriptions (free), feeds, and their aggregator. Then they synthesize their material into their blog about the artist and send it to the class wiki. By the time each group has submitted its work, the class has a mini encylopedia about modern art. The thing about a wiki is that it can always be added to or edited. A wiki is unlike a print encyclopedia or even online encyclopedia without an editing add-on.

This technology world is truly a wondrous thing. Except for some negatives such as landing on inappropriate material, limited by filters, and intentional malice, which can be deleted, these new uses just make me want to buy a copy of this book for every teacher in my school, starting with my principal. Look what you can do! Look what your students can do! Look at the potential! Dream the impossible. OK, got carried away...

(Note: Some of the teachers at my school already use some technology, including teacher blogs. I can't wait to show them this book! In fact, I'm ordering a couple for the professional library!))

As our students continue to advance technologically, this book assists teachers with the terminology of web 2.0 tools. It's clearly written and shares relevant examples of the use of the internet in the classroom. I have used this book as a text in a course and found it to be meaningful and applicable. For any teacher thinking about new ways to engage students through the use of technology, this is the book!

this is a great introduction to web 2.0 and some of the cool tools available. It has up-to-date information that allows the neophite to get up and running in no time. I have told many of my fellow ed majors about this book. It is a must for the bookselves of those studying to be our children's new teachers. Dive right in--the water's fine!

This book gives an introduction to a number of Internet-based tools and how they can be used by teachers. The focus tends to be on K-12, but the principles are applicable (generally) to other settings, including higher education.

The author covers blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking, Flickr, and podcasting. Some strengths of this book include:
-Solid introduction to each tool for those not familiar
-Simple "how to" to get started with each tool
-Good pointers to resources, especially the free ones
-Some commentary on the significance of these tools that goes beyond "gee whiz"

Some weaknesses:
-In spite of a focus on K-12, there was little discussion of how to use these tools to support specific educational standards. Granted, that's a huge task, but some examples would be nice. Then again, if you "get" the tools, that exercise is for the reader.
-Huge emphasis on blogs, much shorter entry on podcasting. I can only guess that the author wrote about what he knew most about.

The physical paperback itself is ok. Mine definitely shows the wear and tear of being carried around in my bag.

Overall: if you're a teacher (or technology coordinator) and are a relative newcomer to these tools, this is a very good place to start.

"The social connections that students are now making on the Web, the ability to share and contribute ideas and work, the new expectation of collaboration, the ability to truly extend the walls of our classrooms. . . these ideas are at the core of the Read / Write Web," says Will Richardson. "As educators, it's imperative we understand the implications of these capabilities for our classrooms."

A classroom teacher for more than 20 years, Richardson recently integrated weblogs, RSS, and related internet technologies into his curricula and is now an evangelist for the teaching and learning potential in what he calls "the Read / Write Web."

In "Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms," Richardson shares first hand classroom experience of how the read / write web opens up new possibilities for students to learn from each other and from authors and scientists and other professionals.

Blogging is fun, but student work can still be held to high standards. Richardson evaluates the quality of student blogging in terms of the intellectual depth of the posts, the effectiveness of the writing, the level of reflection regarding the ideas expressed, and the willingness to contribute to and collaborate with the work of others.

Richardson does not sidestep the risks involved in the opening up students and their work to the world via the Web. He explains how to create and communicate policies for security and safety. For teachers hesitant to begin using classroom weblogs and wikis Richardson suggests that a good entry point is to build a class portal to communicate information about the class and to archive course materials.

Students love an audience, and that potential online audience is one of he most important aspects of the read / write web. "The idea that the relevance of student work no longer ends at the classroom door can not only be a powerful motivator but can also create a significant short in the way we think about the assignments and work we ask of our students in the first place," he says.

"Teachers are tapping into the potential of a World Wide Web that is a conversation, not a lecture, where knowledge is shaped and acquired through a social process, and where ideas are presented as a starting point for dialogue, not an ending point."