(a cool place for Sweet Home Central Teachers to check out the Read/Write Web)
Sweet Home Central School District
Staff Development Day Presentation - 2/1/08
Wiki created by Geoffrey Hicks
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is the "second generation" of websites that change the dynamic from using the Internet as a means for looking up and retrieving information to using the Internet as a platform for creating, communicating, participating, thinking, and learning. Web 2.0 has been characterized as the Read/Write Web - a place for collaboration and conversation that transforms curriculum and allows learning to continue long after the class ends. The technologies are demanding that we reexamine the way we think about content and curriculum, and they are nurturing new, important shifts in how best to teach students (source: Will Richardson, 2006).
Big Shift #1: Open Content
It used to be that schools & teachers "owned" the content they taught in their classrooms. Most curriculum was taught from a textbook with a few added resources thrown in. Outside of what school provided, however, students had limited access, aside from newspapers, magzines, and library reference materials, to additional information about the subjects they were studying. Today, however, the breadth and depth of content is staggering. The amount of information students can access is is more current than any textbook, and it is "open-source", meaning everyone can contribute to it.
Big Shift #2: The Social, Collaobrative Construction of Meaningful Knowledge
For generations, the typical expectation of our students has been that they work independently ("do your own work") and produce that work or content for a limited audience, usually just the teacher giving the grade and perhaps for the other students in the class. There were few opportunites for anyone outside the classroom walls to read, see, or comment on their efforts. Today, the Read/Write Web makes it easy for students to produce work in truly collaborative ways for large audiences. Information created and published in this way takes on a new social context that requires us to change the way we think about what we ask our students to produce, not as something to be "finished" but as something to be added to and refined by those outside the classroom who may interact with it.
Big Shift #3: Readers Are No Longer Just Readers
In an era of textbooks and printed resources, we could be pretty sure that the content we consumed had been checked and edited before being published. Today, however, readers cannot assume that what they are reading has been reveiwed by someone else with an eye toward truth and accuracy. The Web is now a printing press for the masses, and so readers themselves must learn to be critical consumers of the information they consider - and they need to be editors with all of the information literacy skills they need to discern good information from bad.
Big Shift #4: Writing Is No Longer Liimited to Text
The technologies of the Read/Write Web allow users to "write" in many different genres. We can write in audio and video, in music, and in digital photographics, and even in code such as JavaScript or HTML. Each of these forms of writing is easily published for extended audiences. The power of the Read/Write Web is the ability to combine many of these forms of writing into a process of "Rip, Mix, and Learn", taking a piece of content here and another piece there, combining it to produce powerful text and nontext messages and interpretations.
Big Shift #5: Mastery Is the Product, Not the Test
The age of the Read/Write Web is an age not of of participation but of production. For the vast majority of students, showing mastery has traditionally meant passing the test. Today, however, students can display mastery in countless ways that involve the creation of digital content for large audiences. Web 2.0 also allows for easy publishing of performance or project-based learning - it is a cheap, accesible way to maintain an electronic portfolio online
The Web 2.0 Tools page lists a number of sites that illustrate the ideas of the Read/Write Web. The sites are categorized Clicking on the link above will allow you to access the tools page.
The Web 1.0 Tools page provides a listing of more traditional, information based web sties that techers can use to find ideas for lesson plans, curriculum work, assessment creation, and technology integration.
Classroom Teacher Response to Web 2.0
Web 2.0 presents a number of challenges to the education system as a whole, and to the traditional role of teachers in the classroom. The educational system will be under presure to respond to the ability of students to learn 24/7 from a variety of soruces. The vertical model of a teacher disseminating information and knoweldge to students may not be very effective in an environment in which learning is a much more horizontal or collaborative undertaking. The Read/Write Web will in many ways require a redefinition of what it means to teach.
Teachers as Connectors
Teachers will have to start to see themselves as connectors, not only of content, but of people. The access to much greater amounts and more timely information means that it will be imperiative for educators to model strategies to not only find worthwile and relevant content, but to use primary sources in the classroom.
Teachers as Content Creators
Teachers must also become content creators. In order to teach the technologies well, educators need to learn to use them well. They need to become bloggers, and podcasters, to use wikis and the other social tools at their disposal.
Teachers as Collaborators
Teachers need to become collaborators with each other and with students. Web 2.0 allows us to top into the creativity of thousands, if not millions of teachers and students, and we have to be willing to learn together, bothin the classroom and online, to effectively give our students the most relevent experience we can.
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