I have enjoyed reading the text, web 2.0 new tools, new schools, by Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum. I feel like they are totally in the zone when it comes to how we might apply web 2.0 applications in education. Blogging is an effective tool for formative assessment, and helps students see a real application for writing, but also importantly, for editing.
I taught second grade in the past few years, and a student at that young age felt like he or she was being punished when I as the teacher tried to make them see their errors, so they would rework their writing and make it better. They were ok with the “sloppy copy” and then the final published work, but if I expected them to do more than just a little editing for clarity, conventions, or word choice, they felt totally frustrated. Just to have word processing programs available to them for writing erases much of this problem. The laborious task of writing by hand clearly and legibly at age eight is often a major accomplishment. However, keyboarding at that age is rather difficult also.
Our computer specialist at my school is drilling them at length for proper keyboarding skills. When they reach third grade in our district, they go from 30 minutes a week in the computer lab to 90 minutes a week to work hard on proper keyboarding. She has no time in her curriculum to add the fun things I would like to, such as gaming, blogging, and movie making.
A couple of years ago, she made available in our computer lab, at my request, a site on virtual beading. (Virtual bead loom: http://csdt.rpi.edu/na/loom/ index.html). I had taken an arts workshop that taught us to bead and how to tie it into our math curriculum. Native American beading uses four fold symmetry, and the use of two axes on the creating web program teaches students the Cartesian coordinate system. This is a great tie in with math standards. The school purchased beads, all of the second grade classes made some beading with the art teacher, and I thought it was a great thing for the school. However, the beads sit unused since, and I don’t think any of the upper-grade teachers ever used the site.
My point in using this story as an illustration is that many times we find something that could bring technology into education in a real and engaging way, but after the first go around, it is tucked away, and not used again. What is to be done about this? I really feel like using web 2.0 tools would make a difference in education. If students could work collaboratively on projects, and talk about what they are learning on blogs, I think the learning would naturally continue from year to year. It is not the content of the project that would be the important thing as much as the actual learning process of collaboration and recording their thoughts. As students have an opportunity to read each other’s writing and improve their own, they find a genuine real world reason for writing.
I was impressed with Blogmeister’s (http://classblogmeister.com)education-friendly blogging site. This quote by David Warlick, the site’s creator, was in web 2.0 new tools, new schools:
Blogmeister is explicitly designed with teachers and students in mind, where the teacher can evaluate, comment on, and finally publish students’ blog articles in a controlled environment.
I went on the site and browsed for a while. One downside was that something came up blocked on my Internet provider: “Dancing Letters.” The first grade class had read Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom, and had evidently created something from that idea. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see what that was. I like this idea much more than a website because I could give assignments for students to post on the blog for certain areas of study. I would like to look into this further, because I also want to be able to post podcasts that students in my tech/film club might make. I might be better served looking into Elgg (www.elgg.org). This has the capability of posting podcasts, and other features.
References
Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0: new tools, new schools. International Society for Technology in Education. Eugene, Oregon. p 63.
I could use some of those "keyboarding skills"!
ReplyDelete