If I am to be an excellent teacher, I must stay current with technology. I must blog, tweet, and chat, so that I can speak the language of my students. I enjoyed the fast pace of the video "The Machine is Us/ing". This video showed that code is hidden from today's Web 2.0 users, which makes it easier for us to participate in this invention that Tim Berners-Lee intended to be "a collaborative medium, a place where we (could) all meet and read and write" (from Wikipedia Web 2.0) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0.
As a non-traditional student, I remember the days of Fortran and Cobol, writing in code and sometimes on cards that had to be punched out and fed into a card reader. Life is so much easier now! The coding is now transparent. As I was typing, I accidentally hit the Edit HTML button above. Uh oh! I thought, but then realized that what I was writing on the Compose page, was simply being coded FOR ME as I typed. How wickedly cool is that! So, back to the question, "What does Web 2.0 mean to schools in the future?". Well, just as I learned Fortran, Basic and Cobol "languages" and suffered through the tedious process of card punching and sorting through all the error messages, I realized that we have technologically progressed. We have learned from our mistakes and are making it easier for students. Too bad many of us have lost large patches of hair from pulling it out LEARNING from all those mistakes.
The Horizon Report pointed out current technology including grassroots videos (think YouTube), collaborative webs (think Facebook), and mobile broadband. As videos and social networking sites are "old technology" I was impressed with the mobile broadband aspect. While vacationing in Washington DC this summer, I had the opportunity to see that the Smithsonian museums use mobile broadband to provide additional information to interested people, just by texting or scanning a code on your smartphone. Awesome! The Horizon Report also pointed out some emerging technology, such as data mashups and collective intelligence. While I "get" that mashups are the collection of several websites in one site, I can't visualize it yet. I believe that the collective intelligence piece must be like the data they collect from tweets. I still have more to learn.
Anyway, how does Web 2.0 further apply to schools in the future? For the students, they are in for some really cool lesson plans, webquests, interactive learning and more. For the teachers? Gaining access to lesson plans, tips, ideas, etc. through blogs, tweets and chatrooms is powerful. As long as we embrace technology and use it in our classrooms we will engage our students.
That being said, I feel it's important for us, as parents and teachers, to teach students when to step away from technology and "unplug". For example, my girls are only allowed technology on the weekends, unless a report is required, etc. Anyway, my youngest loves to listen to Harry Potter books on her IPOD and my older girl likes to listen to podcasts of Adventures in Odyssey on her computer. I've noticed a glazed over expression on their faces (much like when I'm totally involved in a book on cd while I'm on a long car trip), and sometimes they snip at me if I ask, talk, or look at them. That is when it's time to "unplug". It doesn't just apply to the little people. I've seen grown adults texting while walking in a parking lot, driving cars, in the middle of a girls night out while eating dinner. We have to have balance in our lives. We will have to give kids and students boundaries and remind them that technology is a tool that we should use and manage -- not let it manage us and replace basic human interaction with technological interaction.
Okay, I'm off my soapbox!
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