Enter Web 2.0... the Journey Begins

As someone who has always been keen to adopt anything new coming out of the technilogical realm, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that Web 2.0 and its associated applications/uses only appeared on my radar about a week ago. Pitty, I could have been doing so much more with my middle school students! Their MySpace pages popping and consistent references to YouTube - I never really bothered to think how these apps could actually help me teach and...more importantly... help them learn!

Thanks to Joseph Thibault and Burr Warne at GlobalClassroom, I've been given a Moodle site to work on via their my.floridalearn.com initiative to involve more Florida teachers in the online classroom movement. The classrooms are by no means fully functional... but thanks to Mr. Jim Gates, I've been making some good progress setting up my Meta Course, which to date covers the following content areas:

Exploring Technology Systems (Intro Module)
Electricity and Electronics
Transportation Systems (Land, Air, Water)
Agriculture and Biotechnology
Environmental Science
Drafting and Technical Drawing
Engineering Structures
Simple Machines
Computer Application

Safe to say, relying on old school paper and pencil teaching and learning strategies will simply not allow me to engage these middle schoolers in the type of active, student-centered learning required for them to grasp even the core concepts found in the above listed content areas - much less dig deeper into them! It's time to boldly go where this man has yet to go before...

If I want my students to take ownership of their learning experience and to be truly excited about active, collaborative knowledge acquisition, then I have to be the one to lead. I have to change.

So, that's what I'm doing. I'm modifying my teaching style so that it becomes more in sync with the fizzing, popping, flickering, hyper-linking, blogging, texting, chatting, and flourishing cyber-realm in which my students dwell. Enter...Web 2.0.

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