Blog 4 SBTS Class

Step by Step – Building your Web 2.0 classroom
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=169

This presentation was given by a technology teacher who has been teaching technology for over 10 years. His presentation was well planned and kept my attention. I was upset to find out that the audio and video cut out in the middle of his presentation. Technology, you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.

He categorized basic Web 2.0 skills educators need to learn into 3 groups:

• Explore and Participate – tabbing vs, windowing, bookmarking, signing up and logging in to web sites, how to comment and review
• Deconstruct and Reconstruct – cut and paste effectively
• Emphasis and Alignment – basic information design, using images, uploading properly, connecting and creating

Other key points

• Web is hugely abstract and science fiction for many educators. Our job is to make it concrete and take small steps
• Skill sets are hugely diverse – more pronounced in staff than students
• His definition of Web 2.0 is many things – self publishing systems to make and publishing your own content, social networking sites and supporting activities, widgets, bookmarking, rss

Why is Web 2.0 for teachers?

• Time is the teacher’s most scarce resource, and even though it takes time to learn how to use web 2.0, it great amounts of time down the road – (He did not elaborate on this and I wish he would have.)
• Demonstrate effectively relevant lesson options – do things online that are best done online
• Enhances class interactions – get discussions online better than in the classroom
• Improves student behavior – they love being online (Not sure I agree here because students can easily get sidetracked online.)
• Makes teaching more rewarding (Also not sure if this is true for all educators. It may be rewarding to be able to reach students in new ways or reach those students you couldn’t reach before, but it is a long road to haul for many teachers to integrate any technology, let alone Web 2.0 ideas.)