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How Educators are Using Social Technologies to Redefine Schooling
Robert Mancabelli with Will Richardson

This session is for educators who want to hear about how schools are redefining teaching and learning through the use of web-based social technologies. Attendees will leave with thought-provoking examples of how blogs, wikis, podcasts and other tools reinvent the process of schooling.

WOW! I am in a session with Will Richardson!

Redefining Schools.

Collaboration in meaningful ways what type of school students want. One example of a school where kids already started talking before school even started in September. Kids can communicate with each other 24/7/365, think, reflect, prepare.

Synchronous/Asynchrounous will help special students who otherwise might have stayed quiet in a classroom.

Marco Torres is always trying to find the channel of each student. Multimedia offers possibilities to tap into those channels.

Ask kids to create multimedia. : CREATE student engagement Go beyond simple text and tap into individual student’s talents.

It is a huge motivator for the students that someone beside their teacher is reading it. They have a world wide audience.

Example:

• Guided Tour from the Portland Museum of the Art from Maine (Bob Sprankle’s Room

Big shift, that know you can tap into other people around the world.

Include the author of a book when discussing a book. Kids working with scientist in the Antartica. An opportunity that the social tools can give us. Teach kids things that we would be unable to teach ourselves.

Local/Global/

Flat Classroom Projects from Vicki Davis Discussing “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman

Information Scarce/ Information Rich/ Learner Driven: Every course at MIT is online for free.

Ex. Clarence Fisher Blog

All these tools have potential value:

How do you keep students on task when it was hard enough from keeping them to look out the window. Now they have the world to look at.

How do you successfully help change schools?

Things that need to be in place:

1. Leadership: They have to understand Web 2.0 technologies. It has to come from the top.
2. Professional Development: Can’t tell teachers how easy it is to learn on their own.
3. Reflection
4. Support
5. Access

In order for people to use web 2.0 technology it can’t start in the classroom. They need to start on their own personal life. They have to understand how these technologies change who they are as a learner If they don’t understand that they will not be able to do it with 20 kids in their classroom.

The learning now takes place within a network community. The change will only come when the individual practitioners will change and USE the technology. Unless you experience this network experience for yourselves how can you pass it on to your students?

1. Provide Education: Educate your teachers as to what the technologies re and what they can do. This is a blog, wiki, podcast. Show examples from politics, libraries.
2. Invite Participation: Don’t set the bar. Let the teachers decide what their interests is. Help them decide which tool to use.
3. Nurturing Application

Show successes from your faculty.

Teachers need to understand how to use technology in pedagogically sound ways with their student. A school sets itself up for failure if it gives a laptop to all its students, but the teachers do not have their own laptop. If you expect teachers to use technology in the classroom, then you need to provide them with the possibility to use these technologies for their own personal learning, productivity, and communication.

[tag]FETC, FETC07 [/tag]

Posted: 26. January, 2007 at 1:58 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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