All educators have the responsibility to prepare their students to implement the web 2.0 communication tools effectively and efficiently. Given the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of technology, we teachers must move to affect change in our classrooms, schools, districts, and maybe even beyond. We must begin with ourselves! If we can achieve this one class at a time, what a difference we can make!
What type of world are we preparing our students for? A world of needless facts or a world of communication? We have the power to change and change we must. Yes, we DO have to commit to make the change we want to see in the world. It’s the school’s responsibility to expose kids to tools and techniques related to technology in order to prepare them for the real world. We should look more at preparing our children for the real world that awaits them and that can only be done by putting more of an emphasis on technology in the classroom.
We need to make a personal effort to incorporate the elements of Web 2.0 into our classroom. It is our responsibility as educators to prepare our students to implement these communication tools effectively and efficiently. We can begin with ourselves! If we can achieve this 1 class at a time, what a difference we can make!
Students who have experiences with these technology tools today will most likely utilize them in the workplace…. leading to more productive and contributing members of society.
Many teachers do not always know how to use web 2.0 tools themselves. How can they teach students how to use it if they have not used it themselves? Teachers need to be given concrete suggestions for using these technologies in their classrooms. They must be given concrete examples on how to use it to get students involved or what activities the teachers can use. If teachers do not really understand the technology, how can we ask them to come up with creative ways of using it in their classroom.
Of course, participating in blogs, wikis simply by reading them would give many teachers more specific ideas for using technology in their classrooms.
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Many teachers are not comfortable with technology and need meaningful time devoted to teaching them how to use tools.
Teachers need ongoing and immediate tech support to solve glitches when they happen.
While home-computer and Internet access are now widespread, they are not universal. Mindful of that gap, teachers are reluctant to adopt approaches that put some students at a disadvantage.
Worries about student safety and privacy online also have fueled hesitation in moving ahead in using tools such as blogs. While this concern as understandable, it is also manageable,by using passwords and other safety mechanisms.
Some teachers, pressured to cover material and prepare students for exams, worry that they can’t afford to let students use technology to shape projects in unexpected ways, wasting their precious time.
Some are uncomfortable with upsetting traditional classroom dynamics by letting students be the experts on technology.
To change requires understanding and teachers should become aware that we they not have all the answers anymore.
User generated data/content; control of data they generate
Data consumption and remixing from all sources (reusable data) including continuous update
Rich and interactive User interfaces
Reusable data
Architecture of participation
Continuous and seamless update of software and data
Social Interaction/Communities
Using Web 2.0 Tools
Use blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, elgg, Google docs, Google reader, flash, and other tools to develop projects that follow our students’ inquiries into questions and issues in their lives.
Connect teachers using blogs and wikis and elgg.
Have all students register using the following format: Names should be: First name and first initial of last name and initials of school.
User Names should be the student’s first name and last initial.
Ask that everyone fills out a profile (in elgg etc.). Students can enter likes and dislikes, interests, favorite books and authors and illustrators, they find other students with shared interests.
Students and teachers should NOT post photographs of themselves. Please have your students remove photos.
Let them create and use avatars/icons.
Be careful about using copyright free or creative commons photos in any elgg work.
E-Learning is about being much more part of the process, being much more collaborative and sharing learning and working more together with other people.
Many web 2.0 tools now support this approach to learning. Every day new tools are created that provide opportunities for collaboration and sharing, not just things like wikis, but also things like social networking tools where you can contact friends, colleagues, other students to discuss things.
Things like social bookmarking tools where if you find a good resource you can immediately share it with your colleagues, so this whole approach to learning, collaboration and sharing, is derived from the new way that the Web is moving and this is really exciting stuff and the other great thing about it is that most of these tools, most of these tools are free.
Educational Uses:
• Collaborative research and report.
• Student portfolios.
• Digital media collections.
Podcasts:
• Podcast that discusses current events that relate to course content.
• Present lectures in podcast format.
Vodcasts:
Moodle(Open-source course management system):
• Create online learning communities.
• Many Web2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, chat are standard tools.
Net Generation students are experienced multitaskers, accustomed to using text messaging, telephones, and e-mail while searching the Internet and watching television. They are ready for multimedia learning to be delivered on a flexible learning schedule, one that is not tied to a set time and place.
While kids are not afraid to use innovative digital tools such as blogging and repurpose them for their own uses, adults are usually more cautious.
Rather than appreciating the varied and often creative ways in which young people make use of new technologies, adults tend to be wary or even afraid of digital tools and seek to strengthen restrictions on their use in schools and libraries.
Many schools have banned the use of blogging sites like LiveJournal and Xanga and social sharing and networking sites like MySpace and Friendster. While school restrictions regarding technology use are typically justified by the desire to enhance student safety and to remove distractions from student learning, such measures often aggravate rather than resolve complex problems arising from the new conditions of the digital era.
Members of the Net Generation are connected and technologically savvy, and they see technology as an essential part of their lives.
A major factor in the rapid growth of online activity is simply the desire to connect with others. Teenagers visit social networking sites and use communication tools to make friends, form social groups, and develop their personal identities. This behaviour is an expression of ordinary adolescent development and socialization. It is not all that different from the behaviour of adolescents in previous generations. What is different is that the ever stricter limits on teenagers’ physical space and the age-old desire of young people to escape adult supervision have pushed more teenage activities online and out of the physical world.
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, kids would run and bike all over the neighbourhood with their friends, and teenagers would hang out at local hamburger joints, drive-ins, or, eventually, shopping malls. Now that some malls are banning teenagers without adult supervision and parents are less likely to allow their children to be unsupervised in public spaces, the next logical step for teenagers is to go online and hang out in a virtual environment.
For teenagers, the digital media that schools and parents too often see as dangerous are essential avenues for expression and socialization. In many respects, rewritten the rules of socialization. Whereas teenagers in the past would focus primarily on their physical appearance and behaviour, many of them are now more preoccupied with creating digital profiles and learning how to present themselves online.
The rules regulating peer pressure have changed as well. The result is that many teenagers now spend time in a world that is both real and virtual, and adults generally misunderstand the relationship between the two in the lives of adolescents.
We have entered an era in which this technology is fundamentally changing our culture and impacting every aspect of our lives, including education.
While they want to learn to use basic technology and acquire research skills, students also report that they wantchallenging, meaningful, and interactive instructional activities. Unfortunately, increasing numbers of students at the high school and college levels are becoming less satisfied with their teachers’ use of technology because educators are not using the tools with which students are most familiar, even as a greater and more complex use of technology is expected of students in their future careers.
Outside of school, kids are digitally connected to a world full of information, a world in which it is important to know how to find, analyze, and synthesize information, discover solutions, and create new knowledge.
Kids need to learn when it is appropriate to network for socialization purposes and when to use social sharing tools for purposes of learning or work. While parents certainly bear their own responsibility in this regard, schools should play their part by recognizing and incorporating such social networking tools as valuable learning resources.
A re-evaluation of learning in areas of engagement, individualization, and collaboration. Educational Technology.) Rethinking teaching and learning should move education away from conventional methods bywhich kids are told what to learn, when, where, and how. Instead, knowledge should be actively constructed and students should be made responsible for their own learning. The digital age has added new dimensions to learning with newly desirable skills, primarily the ability to connect, collaborate, and network.
Kids tend to be early adopters of new technologies while adults are often tentative because currently available digital tools were not part of the world in which they grew up. Yet we cannot expect to understand what our kids are doing online or expect them to learn how to be ethical and safe Internet users if we do not set the example. Adults need to learn as much as they can about new online tools such as blogs, wikis, and podcasting and how they can be effectively used for teaching and learning.
The curriculum should be stripped of outdated and irrelevant content and replaced by a model of learning that recognizes that virtually any information can be accessed and manipulated anywhere, anytime, and by anyone.
We must forget the idea that we know much more than our students do, but embrace the idea that they also know much more than we do. When we renounce our own exclusive status as experts, placing our students in the role of teachers and ourselves in the role of students, not only do we model for them the benefits of life-long learning, but we allow them to experience firsthand what every seasoned teacher already knows: If you really want to master a subject, teach it.
Web 2.0 is here. Internet users are not only finding information on the Internet; they are also creating and uploading content.
Web 1.0 was a read-only medium, Web 2.0 is a read/write medium.
Stephen Downes sees the development of Web 2.0 as a shift “from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along”.
Not too long ago, adding Web content was the province of Internet designers who had the necessary knowledge and time to create Web pages using complicated computer programming. Web 2.0 thus exemplifies the increasing prominence of the individual as anyone can create and upload print, audio, and video to the Internet.
Social networking sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com have had a particularly strong influence in the lives of millions of students. These sites let members create their own Web pages, complete with personal profiles, descriptions of their interests, photos, blogs, and a host of other features that help members connect with others having similar interests. MySpace community has ballooned to more than 160 million members in just a few years. Over 200,000 new members sign up each day; it is one of the most visited Internet sites in the world.
The social networking site of choice for most students is Facebook.com, which describes itself as “a social utility that helps people better understand the world around them. Facebook has only been in existence since February 2004, when it was started by several students at Harvard University, it now has over 19 million registered users and ranks among the top 10 most visited Internet sites.
Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us facilitate a new kind of collaborative research since “finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations”.
Social writing platforms such as wikis and Google Docs allow two or more people to edit a document in real time on the Internet, can be integrated into coursework. In particular, such affordances can support collaborative projects in writing-intensive courses.
Blogs can be used to expand course activities beyond the four walls of the classroom, so students are writing for a worldwide audience instead of only for classmates and the instructor. Student motivation may increase when their writing can be read by thousands instead of a handful.
Police harvest information from online discussions and postings to monitor possible illegal activities.
Web 2.0 applications will continue to evolve, making the process of change much more complicated.
