Monday, August 06, 2007

More on Publishing

Linda makes a good point on my previous comment about publishing:

WhilstI agree that what you aptly describe as 'polish and publish' is generally a waste of IT resources, you've got to give the Strategy people credit for trying to catch up on the ground that they've lost.Take a look at the detail on this page: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primaryframeworks/literacy/ictapplications/categories/


The literacy strategy could actually serve to raise standards! Somewhere there is a reference to Y1's inserting pictures and text on to a page, when I presented this as a possible outcome I could see Y3 teachers who were falsely comfortable about their ICT teaching going pale!


Do look @ Linda's link to the strategy above and expand the Word processing link in particularly- I wonder whether many of the competent IT users could tick all those boxes.

Could I pose another question though? Many of these units are wonderfully exemplified ,but have we missed a trick in Y2 when design a website is offered as an activity. Many of my uninitiated colleague would balk @ this as an activity but through wikkis this unit could really live.
Is it possible? And does design a website mean work on one or does it mean just rough it on paper?

1 comment:

Two Whizzy said...

Another question might evolve from whether or not designing a website needs to be an individual activity, or can it be developed from community activity and processes over time. Multimodal theory sees literacy as a process of textual design and redesign. We create class books and anthologies, why not create class web pages around particular subjects, and embed these within the genre we are engaging with. Might this provide in the progression of a unit contexts for other ICT sessions, as children gradually create and refine content offline to be embedded into class blogs, community web pages, shared through theme based wikis or collaboratively developed online through email and their think spaces as an example. Can the term web page be substituted for online publication, where our introduction to a literacy unit is.. Over the next few weeks we are going to be writing content for our website/blog.. about... in this style, and for this audience.

Year one and two students might develop web content through 2 create a story saved as flash, year 5s develop mini flash sites as non chronological reports, in 2create, or write persuasive articles for an ezine to be presented as a blog. Create interactive and navigable or layered texts for younger students such as those developed using hyperlinking in Powerpoint although not websites they might be considered, web enabled. Perhaps we could consider a broader view on what "website" and Web enabled techniologies can provide Think.com and other web 2.0 spaces open up a host of doors to questioning what we mean by a website and web development. One thing is for sure websites need a context and a purpose, like any textual genre. The big thing they have that texts in our books don't is a live audience! How exciting is that!

Hope this is Ok!