The fifth thing, which is reflections of web two point nought (a/k/a thing #5)

The future is before us...the near future is right in front of us, ready to grab. I am not looking into the distant future with robot teachers and students remotely logging in for classes, by then I will probably be dead. But I'm considering today's technological tools and the positive reactions they can illicit in our students.

A huge problem in education is in reaching our students, conveying our material, and keeping students engaged. We need to do whatever is in our power to help our students learn. Web 2.0 tools are being used by many of these students already in their free time, in social media, Google searches, and video sharing. By middle school, most of our students are well aware of what is out there.

I found Steve Hargadon's article, web 2.0 Is the Future of Education very insightful about the impact of technology in education. According to Hargadon, what makes this technology so adaptable to the field of education is that the web 2.0 technology is interactive, it has a two-way nature that requires participation.

In particular, Hargadon's Trend #3, states "everything is becoming participative" which we see in virtually any shopping website where consumers can review their purchases. We have the ability to sort through reflections and opinions from reviewers from all walks of life that may live anywhere on the planet when we consult TripAdvisor, and we are encouraged to offer our own opinions. Likewise, on social media sites which employ web 2.0 tools, people constantly interact and comment on each other's entries. We can look at the posts of friends, friends of friends, or celebrities like Ellen Degeneres. We can sort through their pictures, take part in surveys they have taken, and look to see who their friends are. We can voice our reactions to any of this information.

Web 2.0 tools give us access to a plethora of information, in fact I just used it to determine the correct spelling of plethora. Hargadon infers that access to information, which in itself is immensely powerful, can be expanded to access to people. Imagine the options--we can read about Australian Aborigines in text books, we can read about them informative online articles, or we can read their blogs, or we can converse with them online. Given these options, we know that the ability to make personal connections will impact learning. The obvious choice would be to incorporate primary sources with our  learning to make it meaningful.

It is the natural course of education to follow web 2.0 because education is a means in which we gather meaning from and about the world we live in. Tools that help us interpret our world will help us truly learn, whereas the current state of education often fails to do so because we teach rote facts for high stakes testing rather than teaching concepts for application.

In 50 Web 2.0 Tools Every Teacher Should Know About, Jeff Dunn introduces Jane Hart's compilation of 50 free web 2.0 applications that have many uses in any classroom. I found several that I would use to make my teaching more fun, interactive, and more effective.

One example would be blabberize, which allows you to upload a picture and make it talk. Imagine you are teaching a unit on Shakespeare's Macbeth. Wouldn't it be fun to have a picture of William, himself, explain what was meant by Macbeth's soliloquy of Act 5, Scene 5? Students would certainly find it entertaining. We could then go to Go Animate and make a video about Macbeth lamenting life or interacting with the other characters. If we wanted to spend even more time on this unit, we could even try writing soliloquies and putting them to music in garage band or Ujam. After an interactive unit with lots of outside of the box activities involving creative thought, our students are unlikely to have disengaged, and highly likely to have incorporated knowledge that will stay with them.

These collective learning experiences facilitated with web 2.0 will allow our students to enjoy the learning experience, get more out of it, and internalize learning. Taking them outside of the books and mortar reality of the classroom and elevating the experience to one that has fewer boundaries will open their minds to higher learning.

I am Will, Will I am. I am here to explain a few things that my man Macbeth was trying to say, and I will put it in plain English for those of you that didn't understand just what he was ranting about!