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TESOL 2003
Electronic
Village Online
Session

Our Syllabus

onlinemag
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2003 EV_Online

Session
Moderators:
Sandy Peters
Anne Davis
Julia Karet

Creating an Online Magazine for Student Writing

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Week Six: Adding interactivity to your pages

Now that you have created web pages and considered elements of web design, let's focus on your students' prospective readers–the visitors to your site. Please read on to find out why you need to do this.

A real writing voice and an authentic audience–parts of the writing process
When we publish student work online, what we are doing is validating the writing process for the students. We are giving them a sense of being real writers–writers who have something to communicate–and providing them with a genuine audience–people who want to read what they have to say.

How do we show our students they have an authentic audience?
The next step in the publishing process is to let our students know that they have been successful in their endeavor to communicate their opinions and ideas. We need to do more than just  tell them they have an interested online audience; we need to show them that this is really the case. One way you can do this is by adding interactive features to your web pages. Adding interactivity is an effective way to obtain feedback for your students.

What do we mean by interactivity?
Interactivity means readers have the opportunity to interact with your site in some way–they can react to what they read in it and send you feedback. 

Visiting your web site should become an interactive experience for readers, one that allows them to respond to what they see and read by actually DOING something while they are visiting your pages. For example, they can type something on a page and send it to you, or they can click on a link to sign a guest book or send in their opinions. In doing so, they are actively communicating with both you you and your writers. This, in turn, opens up possibilities of beginning an actual dialog with them. 

Summarizing the advantages of adding interactive features
Why should you do this? What's in it for both you and your students? There are two very big advantages for you–both as a web site creator and a teacher who is publishing student writing online–of adding interactive features to you web site.

  • First, if readers who visit your site can do things there and can communicate with you from your pages, they will find your site more interesting and will want to come back to it. You'll start to build up a readership.

  • More importantly, it demonstrates to your students that people are actually reading what they have published and are responding to it. It proves to them that they have an authentic, interested audience.

Basic elements of interactivity you can use
Let's take a look at ways to add a bit of interactivity to your pages. There are, of course, many sophisticated ways to do this. For our purposes, however, we are going to focus on just four very basic, easy ways to provide the kind of interactivity that can show your student writers that they have successfully communicated something to an unseen, yet authentic, audience.

  1. hypertext links
  2. e-mail links
  3. guest books
  4. forms


Activity: Adding a bit of interactivity to your web site
This activity provides a brief overview of each of the above ways of adding interactivity to your pages and offers links to sites that show you how to add some of them to your site. To do the activity, go to the following page:

Activity for Week 6


Assignment
Adding interactive elements and sharing your efforts
Choose one of the assignments below, depending on your level of experience.

For those of you who have created pages with GeoCities Wizard:

  • Please add a hypertext link or two to one of your web pages, giving a brief explanation of where the link(s) will take the readers or why the readers should go there.

    Also, please add an e-mail link with a specific purpose to one of your web pages. Explain a specific thing that you want the readers to do when they open up the e-mail link. For instance, you can put an e-mail link at the bottom of a page, asking readers to send their opinions or reactions to the content of that page.

  • Then post a message with the URL of your web page(s) so that we can take a look at it (them). Let us see what you have done with hyperlinks and e-mail links. Invite us to send a response to you by clicking on these links!

For those of you who have created pages with GeoCities PageBuilder, but have not yet added a guest book or forms:

  • Try adding a guest book or a form to one of the pages in your web site.

  • Then post a message with the URL of your site to share that page. Invite us to sign your guest book or encourage us to fill out your form!

For those of you who already have all of these interactive elements on your web site:

  • Please post a message with the URL of your site so that we can benefit from your experience by trying out some of the interactive features you have added to your site!

For those of you who are not yet ready to submit your site:

  • First of all, don't worry. There is no need to hurry. You have lots of time to try these things out. For now, it would be wonderful if you just clicked on the sites that other members submit and tried out the interactive features they are using! Click on the links on their pages. Sign their guest pages. Fill out their forms. Post comments if you would like to.

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