Voices from the Middle - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2000

Suggests that teaching students to evaluate what they read on the Internet is critical: they need skills to determine validity, aesthetic or literary quality, accuracy, and authenticity. Offers web site evaluation questions for adult readers, and a web site evaluation form for students.

Suggests the authentic audience found on the Internet has a profound effect on the quality of student writing in all grades, and that the key to successful technology projects is integrating them into the curriculum so that computers are a means, not an end. Offers ideas for classroom activities and projects using stand-alone computers, and using computers with Internet access.

Looks at how technology has changed an eighth-grade teacher’s world of teaching and learning in a variety of ways, including: professional growth; connecting the writing process with word processing; presentation of information (such as short story elements or parts of speech); research on and access to the Internet; electronic literary magazines and portfolios; and e-mail and online discussions.

Describes the author’s own rough start learning about hypertext, and how she began to introduce her middle school students to hypertext. Observes processes students used working on the hypertext “Slave Narrative Project,” a joint project between social studies and English departments in the author’s middle school and an American teacher in Ghana. Discusses assessment of such work.

Discusses 7 questions developed by the author to evaluate web sites. Offers a list of 42 web sites in several categories useful to middle school teachers both for classroom use and professional development: super-linkers (indexes of useful sites); reference materials; writing instruction; literacy, reading, and literature; and educational organizations and professional development.

Describes a project that connected eighth-grade readers and preservice English teachers via e-mail to see how they would create their own world of talking and thinking about literature. Offers 2 case studies that examine how these dialogues helped preservice teachers develop questioning, modeling, and assessing strategies. Concludes that e-mail technology can function as a justifiable meeting place for valid discourse.

Describes how the author’s 6 middle school students living in a village in the Yukon, 100 miles off the road system just below the arctic circle, enthusiastically wrote stories or poems about their lives. The students shared their works via an online electronic conferencing system with students from the unimaginably different landscape of the American Southwest.

The articles in this themed issue, “Literacy in a High Tech World,” offers thoughtful, insightful, and powerful ways to connect students to analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating what they read, write, and create on and through technology.