Technology or General Malaise
At first when I started researching and writing about Web 2.0, I was excited all the time and could not wait to try new things. Now, I'm feeling a bit stumped for new ideas about how I can use it in my teaching and research. Not that I think the potential is not there, but just that I am seeing so little change in actual teaching practices. I just read a conference paper written by Cleborne Maddux. La Mont Johnson, & Rhoda Cummings entitled Interactive Web Sites that Teach. It's not available online and I had to request it through my university and the ILL system. One of their points is that education has changed little even though computers and the Web are almost everywhere. In a local district, students get laptops and rarely use them for meaningful activities and the presence of laptops in the classroom has not revolutionized education.
I think my optimism about technology and life will return at some point, but it's hard to be excited now when it feels like nothing is changing.
On a side note, I'm trying something decidedly low tech in the coming weeks. I'm going to attempt to dye yarn and then knit it into a sweater for my nephew. The knitting will be no problem, but the act of mixing dye and getting this all to work out will be a challenge.
Comments
Last year I "discovered" web 2.0 and was very excited to use it in the classroom. But in the excitement of discovery I would find new tools each week and I wlould try and incorporate them into my classroom. This created a very wide river of technology in my lesson plans but it lacked depth. I and my students became frustrated and nothing technologically substantial came from the lessons.
This year I have decided to focus on only two web 2.0 tools, wikis and podcasts. Both of these web 2.0 tools have been around for a while and are easily adaptable to a classroom environment.
Right now I am using podcasts as a form of reflection on our lessons each day. I choose one student at random and they produce a short podcast of "Today in art we" http://tiny.pl/2lwn
After three weeks students are starting to understand the process and looking froward to the minute we spend at the end of class creating the podcast. I will not start the wikis till after the winter break. hopefully by then the students will be able to create their own podcasts with little help from me.
Posted by: Chan Bliss | September 14, 2008 7:43 PM