Words as Collaboration tools

I'm reading a book called Choice Words by Peter H. Johnston for my MAE mentoring group. The book is about using what we say to student to get them to see themselves as learners. The whole book has brought me full circle to back to collaboration and the Web 2.0 tools that I use in my classroom.

The chapter I just finished, "An Evolutionary, Democratic Learning Community," really brought this concept home and can lend itself well to my research on blogging. The main topic of this chapter is: "children grow into the intellectual life around them," which is primarily social (65).

Teaching students how to react and use other students in the class is one of the greatest gift we can give them. They can use this knowledge outside of our class to create their own learning communities. Students need to understand that learning happens when we are working together toward a common goal and seeing commonalities and differences in opinion.

THIS IS WEB 2.0!

If we can teach our students to use Web 2.0 tools to collaborate and build learning communities, we are teaching them to learn forever.

This collaboration and learning community should not stop at our students, this is how we foster our own growth as learners. The Global Learner project (knowing or unknowingly?) has fostered this collaboration and is harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to create a teacher's learning community.