Blog 10

Both readings for this week offered great advice on tools and resources for English Teachers. The Handa article offered an array of websites that support and enhance learning in the English classroom. Though I have not been fond of most of the visuals or images presented in this book(to me they seem to offer more confusion than clarification for whatever they are trying to explain), the figures on page 168-169 were actually beneficial to me. These worked well at the beginning of Handa's article because they defined and explained each of the terms she later discussed. The discussion of Exploratory Hypertext and Constructive Hypertext once again brought into light the whole idea of online writing vs. traditional writing and the existence of "linearity" in both. The section on web page evaluations was extremely helpful to me since I am working on a project that deals with website evaluations for a unit on Greek Mythology. I checked out a couple of the links that Handa recommends and they will be very useful to me. The Speakeasy Studio & Cafe website that Handa described in the section for Using Existing Resources really caught my attention, however after trying multiple times to access it I was unable to. After trying to figure out what happened to this website, I found out it no longer exists. :( Overall Handa's article seems to offer a lot of online resources and websites that seem to be of use to teachers, assuming that the websites still exists.

The Moran and Herringtion article also brought up a recurring theme, how to evaluate hypertext writing. At the beginning of their article they posed two questions that they set out to analyze. The questions were, "What criteria should we use when evaluating hypertexts?", and the second question was, "Is it possible to evaluate hypertext and non-hypertext using the same criteria?" pg 247-248 I really appreciate Moran and Herrington's honesty and the candid way in which they accept that they have no true answer to their second question. I really appreciate how they used criteria that applies to both traditional and hypertext. Focus and central claim, constructive thinking, organization, syntax, and degree of difficulty are all important areas for evaluation and grading student work. The brief but to the point discussion in this article about these areas will certainly help me in creating rubrics for my own students.