Thing 1-B : Web 2.0

I just finished reading about Web 2.0 and seeing the videos. Some of the ideas are pretty overwhelming for someone not raised in the culture of technology or who have only had limited access. I'm hesitant to use a lot of tech in the classroom because of these issues. With my ESOL students at my old school, if I took a survey, I'd say about 10% of my students have never used a computer at all (recent immigrants usually) and more than 50% had never done serious work with a computer. We used to take them once a week to the lab just to teach them how to log on, type, and do a search. The other 40% may have a computer at home for games or the occasional limited work because it belonged to a parent. My American students tended to have more experience so that was less frustrating for me, but I'd say there were still about 50% with no computer or no Internet service at home. Anyway, that school was a Title 1 school. Since AHS participates in Title 1 and has quite a few students on free/reduced lunches, I'm feeling that these students might be in similar home situations with the computers.

What that means to me is that if I assign work that a student might not be able to finish in class, this student may require extra time away from class to use a lab. That's not a good situation and that could be avoided by not using technology. As teachers, we have to keep things like this in mind since we're not trying to exclude students when we give assignments.

Now, on a more positive note, I haven't used podcasts before, but my old school had us post lesson plans to a shared server. I could check out what the other teachers planned to do for similar topics. An example: the clothing unit! So, I'm looking for something fresh to do with that and I check the Spanish teachers to see what kinds of things they do. One is organizing a "fashion show" and asking all her students to wear nice clothes, fancy clothes, or ugly, out of style clothing. Then, I check the other French teacher because she usually has interesting writing topics. I've done this kind of non-face-to-face collaboration before and it saves a LOT of time. As an added bonus, I get to avoid the situation of "yeah, sounds like that works well in your class, but I don't really like it/think it will work in mine...."

Outside of my personal example here, I can see that some of the tools have been helpful and some are absolutely hurtful to our students. Yes, they have a lot more information available and they can get that information quickly. Hurtful because in some situations, students need to know the FACTS and what they're reading are someone's OPINIONS. This leads to students getting the wrong information and then they think that information is correct because someone posted it on the web and that page gets a lot of hits. Their ideas of validity are completely different than ours and they don't always use good judgement or are unable to make good decisions yet. I attended the workshop on Cyberbullying last year. That is an excellent example of a good idea gone bad. The worst part about all these tools being available is that the potential for abuse is incredible and there is really no way to monitor everything the kids are doing or to correct/stop them when they get caught. Yes, I have seen pics of kids mooning their friends' camera phones...

As a sometimes English teacher, I was horrified at the thought of kids not discussing, but writing blogs about a reading assignment. So, what were they using the class time for if they were blogging their discussion outside of class? Or maybe they were using a lab and blogging during class? Typing takes more time than talking. Sounds like a waste of time, but they weren't clear in the article about how class time was being used. Also, there have been many times where I have had to write formal reports, letters, etc. in everyday life. I do not see a benefit of having students avoid the formal paper techniques just because writing a paper is boring. They still need to know how to do it! Also, they do not get enough practice using formal speech. Getting to college and not knowing how to write a paper is completely unacceptable. Writing correspondance to your boss like you're writing a casual e-mail to a friend is completely unacceptable. I can support teachers wanting more student involvement, but there is a limit and we cannot always go down to their level. Sometimes they have to be pushed to meet ours.

Another thing that disturbed me about the podcasts was the potential for community involvement. Yes, we want parents to be interested and to participate, but what happens if you've already told parents to tune in and your class discussion turned to a controversial topic that you didn't intend? That one incident may ruin your reputation as a competent teacher. I almost get the feeling of BigBrother invading the classroom. :) Again, there is a great potential for sharing, but we need personal space, too. I have parents sometimes asking why we're teaching this topic. There's not much I can do besides say "It's part of the curriculum and it's useful." I don't need parents making my job harder by challenging what we're doing in the classroom on a daily basis or asking why we're not doing a presentation some other way or using different teaching techniques or or or... I trust people in the community to know how to do their jobs, so they should respect that I know how to do mine. Unless there was a real concern about students failing or needing some kind of monitoring, I just find that podcast idea invasive. I can see students sharing projects with the community and parents saying their work is not to their standards when our teaching goals are very different from the parents' standards. Here's an example from a colleague: She was teaching a unit on houses in Mexico with the goals of basic vocabulary and colors. The bedroom is big and blue kind of stuff. One of the administrators walked in for an observation and later marked her down for not introducing more cultural aspects like discussing property taxes in Mexico. hehe We laughed about that one for weeks because it came from a person who is supposed to know what we're doing.

Personally, I think it would be great to use tech to correspond with keypals rather than waiting weeks for penpal letters to arrive. It's great to pull videos from different sources to enhance lessons. It's fun to make classroom videos and show those to friends/other classes. A thing to consider, though, is that sometimes the tech takes time out of classroom activities where students are spending too much time doing "setting up" work or just "making it pretty." This usually means a lot of monitoring on my part with encouragements of "hurry it up, we've got 2 minutes left!!!!" My favorite is "Omg, my project didn't save!"

Anyway, I can definitely see where Web 1.0 is still useful, but I realize that most of our students are into the interactive parts of the web. Blogs and other things are great for exchanging ideas, but we really need the 1.0 for things we don't want our children to find and change (like the report on the real Titanic where Captain Leonardo da Caprio went down with the ship, copied and pasted from Wikipedia). I'm not saying that's not a great tool, but too many cooks spoil the soup sometimes. Someone was messing around and changed a single line of the text to include Leonardo and of course my clueless (and lazy) ESOL student decided to write about that.