How we have missed the boat,

I been working with in service teachers and doing workshops on Web 2.0 for the past year. I am amazed at how fast this technology has been adapted. Hard held computing in the form of phones, e-books, $100.00 laptops and thin clients all running 2.0 apps will become the new paradigm. The time to build another dinosaur lab, buy expensive laptops or spend any more money on local resources has long passed. Let the big players like Google support the applications, it's time for schools to focus financial resources on the curriculum with "PROFESSIONAL" development using new tools not over priced unreliable tools. Disagree? Let me know, I can find you a good deal on a sliderule.

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Comment by Sue Palmer on March 5, 2008 at 2:38pm: Totally agree!

Sue P

Comment by Laura Gibbs on March 5, 2008 at 3:46pm: Agreed indeed! At my school (University of Oklahoma), we are paying a huge amount of money for a course management system (Desire2Learn) which is clunky and old-fashioned, unable to come even close to the collaborative publishing tools that abound now with web2.0.

The reasons that we use this system are administrative, not pedagogical - it is the legal security and red tape that is at work here, not the quality of the product for teachers or students. I treat the course management system as a glorified online quiz tool and gradebook, and for all the actual LEARNING, I use tools that are available for free on the open Internet.

:-)