thoughts

I'm still digesting the thoughts from this weekend. While I don't fully have them developed and am too tired to start running through them, I'm going to quickly run through the connections I have made and then return to flush them out in the next few days

As Global Learners we began with the tools, but the process quickly and instantaneously flushed itself out through professional and personal development which intern became a reflection on learning how to guide learning.

EduCon was a conference for and by those in the EdTech frame of mind. The focus of the conference was learning, the technology was secondary.

Has the concept of web 2.0 given us the voice and means to transform education? Under the tenants of web 2.0 we encourage critical thinking, communication, problem solving, and collaboration. These are also/now the tenants that we try to change education. Has web 2.o influenced school 2.0 or merely given us the voice and means for change?

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.

slowing down to gear up

This was my final day in sessions with Darren. I am so inspired by watching amazing teachers do their thing. He finally brought everything full circle for me: connecting our content, pedagogy, and the technology. Seeing how he used technology to spark interest, to see the content in real life experiences and finally as a tool for students to present their learning!

It would be easy to get stuck in using technology for its surface level qualities. But, Darren has used to engage and motivate student learning.

This was an amazing experience for me and I am going to spend the weekend doing nothing with it! Hey-- we all have to have boundaries!! -- I need for this information to finish seeping in, and then on Monday or Tuesday I'm going to add to my Technology Personal Action Plan and find some way to make sure I'm not stuck at the surface level of all this!