Reflection Ch 4-5 Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts

I thought these two chapters were really interesting. In fact, chapter 4 really impacted my thinking about wikis. I have lived with all high school teachers and even college professors forbidding the usage of wikipedia in any research paper or essay. However, these teachers/professors just focused on the thought of anyone can edit the website and make a mistake or vandalize the information. They didn't realize that there are constantly people checking the entries and correcting them. It's also interesting to understand that wikipedia is an unbiased and unopinionated resource.  The book shows that wikipedia is said to be the most reliable encyclpedia. As a future teacher, I would not detour kids from using wikipedia but encourage them to use it for quick (hence the name wiki) information. The book even suggests having your students collaborate and negotiate editing on the wikipedia (or other wiki sites,) which is a great idea.

Chapter 5 was really interesting because I have never heard of Really Simple Syndication. It's really neat to understand that a bunch of websites that obtain a similar subject can be put all into one. Like the book says, it would be convenient if your have 30 websites that constantly update new information that you want to share with your students. You can set up a Really Simple Syndication to simplify and convert all the text from all the websites and put it under one. This way you don't have to waste time looking for all the different websites. As a future teacher, I would definitely use this idea to get my class more organized.