An 8th grade science teacher, Ms. S, retrieves her MP3 player from the computer-connected cradle where it’s spent the night scanning the 17 podcasts she subscribes to. Having detected three new programs, the computer downloaded the files and copied them to the handheld. En route to work, Ms. S inserts the device into her dash-mounted cradle and reviews the podcasts, selecting a colleague’s classroom presentation on global warming and a NASA conference lecture about interstellar space travel.
Techlearning > > A Day in the Life of Web 2.0 > October 15, 2006
ODuring a birds of a feather session at NECC this year, on Web 2.0, one of the questions that kept coming up was, “What does this really look like in a school?” I pitched the ideas as an article for TechLearning while I was there and the result, with great help from the editors at T&L, is now up on their web site.
It’s a miandering tour of a handful of applications of read/write tools in the culture of a school. Enjoy, share, and add to the story.
technorati tags:warlick, education, technology, web20, blogging, edublogging, rss, socialbookmarks, podcasting
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This is an ideal glance at what should be happening in education. Unfortunately, this is not a reality for many school districts. In fact, my school district automatically blocks any service/website that allows interactivity (most blogs) and online storage. Thus, my students can’t access iTunes, blogs, Writely/Google Spreadsheets, YouTube or any e-mail service.
In our MySpace world, safety is obviously a concern. But a default rule to shut out many of these new interactive tools stifles educational creativity. Most teachers do not have time to learn these new tools while simultaneously fighting with their IT department to be able to use them! And this will be more of an issue if DOPA passes in congress.
How do we get around this?
Brian has a great point, I feel the sharpness of it personally as someone who can no longer blog or podcast with my students. I think the only solution is education and patience as the legal issues are weighted against the effectiveness and fear gives way to enlightenment. This has been a difficult issue for me, but I think that those educators who are using this technology need to continue to share, publicize and shout their successes from the mountain tops so that they can pave the way for others. In other words, thank you to all of the people who are making web 2.0 happen, keep up the good work.
(moblogged)
I commented on this in the K12 Online Conference notes wiki this morning (http://davidwarlick.com/k12online/). It seems that we went through this in the early years of the book. They were chained to walls. Eventually we realized the value of making them available, and I think that we will come to the same conclusion with the read/write web.
I do hope that we do it quickly, because the longer we ignore or block these information tools the longer our classrooms will appear irrelevant to students.