Weeks 3 and 4 were quite an eye opener for me. I have found it very challenging to find time between work, school, family, church, and other to really explore all of the tools that web 2.0 offers us as educators. I just found out that my district has a full time ed technology person on staff that deals specifically with web 2.0. There is a class starting to help teachers become familiar and manage all of these tools!
In his book An Ethic of Excellence Ron Berger states that the quality of student work will increase if it is made public. Web 2.0 is a great way to publish student work. After collaborating with others, making revisions, and having the ability to post the finished product for other classes and classmates to see is very rewarding for students. I have filmed student skits before and with out fail first hour begs “let’s watch second hour’s skits”. Second hour inevitably asks “let’s watch third hour’s skits”. And so it continues throughout the day. I love it.
As far as a new perspective I gained from exploring web 2.0 I think that it is important that I make sure that the technology that I integrate is meaningful. I have found with my Spanish I students it does not matter what kind of picture sharing or micro blogging online collaboration tools there are available they are meaningless if students don’t have a basic literacy or vocabulary internalized. I have found that students end up asking me to translate their assignments for them because they don’t have vocabulary available for recalling when it is needed. Students use Google translator to do work for them and then they have no idea what they wrote when I ask them. Some of you may have heard the metaphor of a bad guitar player with an amp?
Sometime I feel that writing and collaboration with Web 2.0 is rather informal. That is okay for social networking sites, however I would not want students to continue bad habits such as “IM talk” (jk, omg, rolf, etc.) in their writing. Maybe I need to realize that the English language is evolving as these terms have encroached into student speech.
I sounded like we were all a little infowhelmed these past two weeks as we discovered what was out there to use. I made my screen cast of how to post an assignment on Moodle for students to access.
Here is the Moodle web site
Here is my Moodle page for my Spanish class (caution: work in progress!)
Moodle is a course management program that we are using at Kodiak High School to help students who travel for athletics, take extended vacations, or just need a place online where they can see what is going on with their classes. Instead of using four or five different programs to collaborate, we can do it all through Moodle. Moodle facilitates tools such as forums, quizzes, games, audio recordings, course calendar, and course events. I am learning how to be better organized as a teacher to us Moodle to its full potential.
So in a nut shell here is what I think
- Technology does not solve all of our problems as educators
- Students are usually more comfortable with technology then many teachers
- Communication with Web 2.0 tends to be casual and informal
- Technology should not replace instruction rather enhance instruction
- Web 2.0 is a great resource for collaboration all around the world
- Web 2.0 is a great place to publish student work
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