Web 2.0 in an English Classroom

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on February 13, 2008 at 10:35am

We've done online book discussions using Moodle and Blackboard. I also saw a blog written as a famous person, I thought that was a fun idea.

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Permalink Reply by Web 2.0 Class on February 14, 2008 at 6:14am

Thank you, I am going to look up the possibility of Online Book Discussions, any other ideas?

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on February 14, 2008 at 6:30am

You can see our online book discussions here http://www.smsdonline.org/login/index.php You can login using baguest as username and password. You will not be able to comment but at least you can look around. N.

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Pass on February 14, 2008 at 8:07am

Bryan, the first question that I would ask are what are the objectives of your freshman class. What kinds of information should you learn and think about? What kinds of skills should you master? Once you have answered these questions you can ask yourself "How might a tool from Web 2.0 help achieve this objective? What tool would work best?" I am a strong opponent of using technology for technology's sake. It should only be used to promote learning of valuable content material.

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Permalink Reply by Jack Phelps on February 14, 2008 at 8:46am

I get the sense that they (Bryan and his colleague, who made another post) are part of a "web 2.0" class, and they're helping out teachers around the school by finding/developing specific instructional materials, rather than (in this exercise, anyway) trying to develop the "why" understanding. I didn't get that before either, hence my earlier post.

Bryan, I run a (very young) free website designed to make teaching with the web as easy as it can be by providing some really purpose-built tools, as opposed to the consumer tools like blogs and wikis that work fine for tech-savvy educators, but cause problems for the rest. I would *love* it if you guys checked it out at ChitChat; we're trying to build a centralized source for just this kind of stuff and provide the tools to make it easy to use and share. If you guys want to use it in class, great, but that's not even really what I'm after... we're about to go with creative commons as a default copyright scheme for all the user-generated content on our site, so it's a great place to put the lessons and assignments you build to make them freely available to everyone not just at your school, but around the globe :)

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Permalink Reply by Jack Phelps on February 14, 2008 at 8:15am

Try stuff like this: http://chitch.at/post/372
Have you guys defined what you mean by "21st-century skills" yet? My opinion is that to be competitive in the global economy, graduates need to be able to seek out, define, and solve some pretty abstract problems. It seems to me like that's what you're doing by going out on the web and trying to build some instructional methods using new tools. So kudos to you for getting practice in early :) Assignments like the one linked above are good ways to get started.

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