Like Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I believe that it is critical for 21st century teachers to plug in to the new technologies that envelope most of our students’ lives. School has long borne the boredom label, even before the lure of instant entertainment and interconnectedness graced (or burnt holes in) our pockets. When I was in school, I hid my little black pager behind my belt strap. I suffered the itchy square indentation in my lower abdomen with pride – I had a pager. I was connected to the world outside of my classroom. Whenever a 143 (I love you) or 777 (my best friend’s pager code) would vibrate that little plastic box, I knew I was somebody. Those codes were infinitely more interesting to me, straight-As girl, than the lecture note trivialities my teachers were listing on overhead projectors as I hurriedly hand-copied them down. If that little plastic box, a thing I wanted so badly that I actually got a job in order to pay the $10 a month bill for, mattered to me so much but offered so little, the amazing technologies in students’ pockets today are insurmountably seductive to students. Who am I kidding? I can barely stop at a red light these days without unlocking my phone.
The incredible Internet technologies at our fingertips now open up the world to us. I’m only 31, but the technological landscape has changed dramatically since my pager days, and it would be irresponsible, narcissistic and ignorant really, of me to pretend that my students have more to learn from my mouth than from the Internet; as Richardson writes, “the implications of [the] new Web are all about learning first, teaching second” (p.6). What I need to do, what we all need to do, is learn to navigate its depths with development of critical thinking and writing about social and literary issues in mind. Then I (we) can teach my (our) students to do that, too.
Twitter is an invaluable resource in this regard. Who knew that an entire educated and research-savvy underbelly thrived in a social media collaborative that I thought would bore me to death with droning celebrity gossip and poorly-composed teenaged rants? Well, welcome to Twitter, me! It took me some exploration and playing around to figure out whom to follow and how to navigate the hashtag system, but my exploration and play brought me into a world of resources I never knew I could have been accessing for years by now. I’m looking forward to discovering some interesting ways people are using it in their classrooms.
An ideal Web 2.0 classroom would solve what is undoubtedly a current and worsening educational crisis: our "educational system...is out of touch with the way its students learn" (Richardson, W., 2010, p. 8). This crisis isn't incredibly new, either. David Warlick wrote about the glorious possibilities of county-wide Web 2.0 integration in 2006 - that was nearly a decade ago. He described shared podcasts at the classroom, administration, and county levels, syndicated teacher blogs, RSS aggregates of research sources and supplementary curriculum resources, and cross-curricular virtual collaboration. Again, we could have been--but weren't---doing all of that a decade ago. A lot has changed since then in students' social and virtual lives. Little has changed in their classrooms. Some teachers post what they talked about in class on a administration-mandated blog at night. Some even hyperlink worksheets.
What can and should change? As educators, we have to start by getting past our fear of technology, especially of social media. Twitter, for example, is an incredible resource that we can teach our students to use in order to learn and grow into more discerning virtual citizens. A unit on propaganda, for example, could include a Twitter research element that compares the presentation of current hot topics from opposing perspectives and delineates trends in pop culture response as compared to academia's response. Students could use Google Docs to collaboratively track and discuss the resources they find, then use Google Slides to create a visually engaging presentation of their findings. They can then blog about their now research-based understanding of the hot topic and how this new approach to research informs their future learning.
Gone, I hope, are the days of filling out stacks of resource cards. It's time we stop forcing archaic methods on a generation that spends its time exploring, creating, and publishing often uninformed content online. It's time we start teaching them to do just that, only better.
References
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms - 3rd ed. California: Corwin.
Warlick, D. (2006). A day in the life of Web 2.0. Technology & Learning Magazine. Retrieved from http://sddial.k12.sd.us/events/laptop_institute/Files/monday/warlick_harnessing_the_new_shape_of_information.pdf.