Week 1- Chatting it up Online

Title:Chatting it up Online
Author:Pamela Livingston

I thought this article was a great one. I have never heard of being able to chat online with authors and have an immediate response almost like you are chatting in person. I thought it was such a great aspect of this school. I think that getting the students involved by being able to chat with someone "famous" would really interest them more in reading and researching other authors. I thought this was neat because you can only find out so much about an author by researching information on the Internet. Being able to chat face to face brings a whole new range of questions and conversations the students can have for the author.

Questions:
1) How would this technology change the way I teach?
By having this technology in my classroom I think I would be able to teach more effectively. Reading a book is one thing but being able to ask the author questions such as: why they wrote they book? and what were their initial thoughts and changes were as they went along would change the dynamic of the classroom. I think that children would become way more interested in reading books because they would be able to feel a personal connection with the author. Therefore, I would teach differently because I would allow the children to come up with their wildest, but appropriate, questions to ask the author and pretty much leave the online chatting up to them because it is their questions, not mine.
2) How would the students benefit from this technology?
I think students would benefit from this technology greatly. If I had something like this when I went to elementary school I think I would be way more interested in reading today. It is one thing to read but to feel like you are on a personal connection with the author makes the reading so much more important. Once a book is read, and students figure out why the author wrote it, their views might change and they might come up with new ideas and thoughts about the context. I think this technology would just stimulate their learning much more than it does now.