The Importance of Website Creation in Education

The Ability to Create

The Importance of Website Creation in Emergent Education

In emergent education, it is often helpful to use websites as a means of distributing information from teacher to student and from student to teacher. Below are two articles and subsequent discussion questions analyzing the benefits and consequences, as well as other questions, stemming from the ability to create websites.

Teaching Writing by Creating a Website (Tuesday, January 6, 2009; The Writing Teacher) brings up some interesting points.  Jennifer stones mentions that "creating a website has a lot of elements to enthuse students about writing: a topic they care about, in a media they like to use, with the ability to have their work published and viewed by others. The lessons they learn will carry over into their other writing and thinking activities," which seems to explore concepts of critical thinking in order to build novel ideas, such as a website.  This concept of exploring many ideas--like other websites, articles and the whole Web--attribute themselves well into emergent pedagogy, where this kind of discussion brings about novel ideas.  I think a following discussion period after a trial of research on the Web would provide even more support for creating novel ideas by using an emergent method. 

Discussion points for K-12 Summer Institute:

• What steps do you think are important for students creating their own websites?
• How would you apply this to a classroom that is not teaching English?
• What other implications/successes/failures could result from a student creating his/her own website?

Let's look at this ability to create from another viewpoint: through the students' eyes.  In the article, Mississippi Students Learn Importance of Gulf Coast Wetlands [pdf], PBS TeacherLine "helps Gulf Coast-area teacher build thought-provoking Web site to link curriculum and instruction for school-wide Wetlands project."  The benefits of teachers being able to create these types of materials for their students enhances their ability to create an emergent classroom: they have many facets of information displayed on an easy-to-follow page available to their students, which can thus spur ongoing discussion about the information and breed novel ideas.  PBS cites that "...a significant challenge facing educators today is equipping students with the skills needed to compete in an evolving technological environment," and by being able to create websites, as I have aforementioned, I believe that this challenge can be overcome and that emergent education also receives a boost from overcoming the obstacle.

Discussion points for K-12 Summer Institute:

• Do you think website creation is suitable for all age levels and subjects?
• What do you find challenging about creating a website?
• Should a website be accessible to both students and parents?
• What do you find are the most beneficial things about creating a class website?
• What are some consequences/fears of creating a class website?

Creator: Brielle Stark, June 2009