What can a teacher's web page offer to Internet-savvy students? Try time-saving links and information,
a display space for occasional student projects, and a little credibility.
My students and I agree that my site at http://www.santel.net/~dfisher/
looks pretty plain compared to the dazzling pages of my students who scout the Internet for ideas.
Yet my juniors and seniors appreciate my maintaining a web site mostly for their
use. Those who work on their own pages often notify me about problems or offer to help me add more
sophisticated features. Furthermore, students can link to sites where they can see me as a
person whose writing is public and, therefore, vulnerable.
We have experimented with posting projects, especially if those postings result in comments or critiques by other class members. For example, my AP students wrote sonnets after we studied Italian and English sonnet form. See http://www.santel.net/~dfisher/Sonneteering.html for the results. While reading each other's original sonnets was not assigned, I knew from student comments that they had enjoyed each other's often satirical attempts at sonneteering.
After linking my page to The Blue Mountain Card's Shakespearean Sonnet page at http://www.bluemountain.com/eng/shakespeare/indexval.html
and telling students that sending sonnets can be very romantic, I warned them about knowing what a sonnet meant before sending it.
From the site, they printed a sonnet to study and then attempted to explain it to a
modern-day hater of sonnets. From their documents saved to disks or sent to me via email, I posted their chosen sonnets with explanations to
the AP web page. Then their project partners visited the web site, evaluating the partner's work for correct analysis
and lively voice. (Teachers will recognize this sneaky ploy to have students study yet one
more sonnet.)
Finally and most importantly, my web page has become a 'one-stop
shopping link' not only for my students, but also for colleagues and students in other classes.
Links to such writing tools as Dakota Writing Project, Purdue Writing Lab, Strunk and White's Elements of Style, as well as to reliable research
sites offer students quick help at home or at a writing session in a school lab or classroom.
Literary resources on the Internet expand daily.
Instead of handing out required reading lists, I've posted mine along with links to the SD
Literary Map plus links to lists of award-winning books. At the beginning of a major literature unit, I sometimes add links to particularly rich author
pages and then assign "discovery" surfing. As a result, my students have talked me into offering extra credit for their discoveries of "really
cool author and writing links." My caveat is simply that sites must be
authoritative.
Does maintaining a web site take time?
Sure, but not as much as you might think once you've built the site and learned how to update your
pages and FTP your edited files to your server. I used Adobe PageMill software, and there are many other authoring packages that are easy to
use as well. Send me a note (dfisher@santel.net)
and tell me about your site when it's up and running. Drop in at http://www.santel.net/~dfisher/
to see what Internet goodies my bonus-hunting students have been
discovering.