I enjoy reading the ISTE articles because I gain a wealth of information from them. I decided to read the article titled “Save the World with Web 2.0” in the November issue. The article first explained that students can use the social web 2.0 tools to participate in our global society. Experts then discussed the five problems facing global citizens today and asked teachers to help students with these problems. According to the article and Neil Postman, global citizens need to improve on stewardship, spirituality, democracy, diversity, and language. For each of these five categories a panel led by Walter Parker created six questions that global citizens should try to meet. Two of the questions that stood out to me include:
1. How should we balance the right to privacy with free and open access to information?
2. How should we develop shared global values while respecting local values?
The article then went on to provide examples of how teachers can use web 2.0 tools to promote these categories and questions with their students. Since I am a science teacher I enjoyed reading about how teachers can incorporate Earth stewardship with their students by having the students read and comment on blogs, such as, the “Green Thing,” “Groovy Green,” and “Daily Green.”
I thought this article presented a lot of great information, but I think the suggestions may be too high level for my 6th graders.
Good to hear ISTE is helpful to you and your teaching. I'm interested in knowing how you are managing to integrate some of the ideas you are exploring in 675 into your teaching. One of the persistent problems in teaching is how to link the classroom to the outside world... judicious use of the internet can really open doors and windows on the world.
ReplyDeleteI have been able to incorporate a lot of the web 2.0 tools (weebly, voki, symbaloo, and woordle) into my teaching. I update my weebly website each week for what's going on in our classroom and I have used voki just as an attention grabber at the beginning of a lesson. I have created a symbaloo page for my team to organize all of the websites that we use in science. In addition, I incorporated woordle when students took a pre-assessment over our unit and showed students the woordle which summarized what students know about simple machines. I am struggling to implement some of the tools that I have read about in the ISTE articles, but am working towards that goal.
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