Miss Foster’s Fifth Grade

Web 2.0 is changing the landscape in many ways.  Learning is no longer the teacher directed lecture/question & answer sessions we all grew up with.  It has become more fluid and collaborative.  In the article, Blogs, Wikis, RSS and there’s more? Web 2.0 on the march, the author discusses the embracing of Web 2.0 by the corporate world.  It is improving productivity and communication.  If this is true, we need to really look at the implications for education.  Are our students ready to enter this new world?  These digital natives are probably ahead of most educators who are teaching them.  However it is more imperative than ever that we teach them the critical thinking skills to use these tools that have become the norm today.  As mentioned in the article, educators need to help the students learn to “….apply critical judgment to discriminate when engaging with highly interactive tools, services and content (fact, opinion, commentary, truth and untruths).”  Students today are not content to be consumers of information; they need to be producers also.  Teachers need to move to the side and allow this shift.

Now that is easier said than done.  In this day and age of high stakes testing, standards and emphasis on the end product, it becomes increasingly important to find a way to meet those requirements while at the same time keeping students (and teachers) engaged and supported.  In his discussion, More on School 2.0, David Warlick talks about the ways in which our ‘marketplace’ (or schools) will need to change to reflect the skills we have always been charged with developing in our students.  These include literacy skills and practical experiences.  This has not changed, just the way for students to practice them.  On the part of educators there is a lot of ‘unlearning’ that needs to take place.  We need to realize we are not the only knowledge base these students have any more.  Their world is beyond our four walls in the classroom. (Will Richardson)

It is a daunting task and one that I see myself gearing up for as we speak.  I will need to continue to learn and practice these skills as well as model them for other teachers.  As I have said often through this course (and the previous ones) we need to have a support system for those of us who have begun the journey and a trail for those who are to come to follow.  Then they can blaze their own trails we can follow.  It is up to us and our schools to develop a learning environment that will support this new adventure in technology.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 12:10 am Filed under Best Practices Reflections and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.