http://www.shmoop.com/teachers/

The mission of the site is “To make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age”. While the focus is on literature and poetry, there are also nice resources for social studies, too. Check it out and let me know what you think!

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/

http://twitter4teachers.pbwiki.com/

And a video on Twitter.

So, what was so wrong with our yesterdays? Absolutely nothing, really.

I can still remember Monday nights when my family gathered around the TV to watch one of the four channels available, physically getting up to change the channels. Luckily, we all liked MASH so there wasn’t much arguing over what to watch, although we did argue over who would do the channel changing.

But for our students today, this scenario is completely foreign. It is not their reality nor is it their future.

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because all too often we find ourselves teaching the way we were taught. It’s what we know and understand best. But yesterday’s teaching does not match our students’ reality any more than the scenario above does.

Let’s imagine we have mastered teaching in today’s world, employing current methodologies that are relevant and meaningful for our students. Even given that, how can we possibly prepare our students to succeed in a world that is changing so rapidly? In his presentation Warlick stated, “For the first time in history our job as educators is to prepare our children for a future we cannot clearly describe.”

OK….so we are supposed to teach using new methodologies to prepare our students for a future about which we have absolutely no clue….feeling overwhelmed, yet?

While this is a totally understandable feeling (and one that isn’t all that unfamiliar to most of us in education), I hope that at the same time you are also feeling excitement regarding the potential there is in today’s classrooms for some truly amazing learning experiences. The Flat Classroom Project, where students from different parts of the globe collaborated on projects together, is a great example of 21st Century learning. More than ever before, learning is no longer restricted to what happens within the classroom’s four walls. Teachers today have the opportunity to increasingly become facilitators of learning rather than distributors of knowledge. In the 21st century classroom, our students have the opportunity to become active participants in the learning process rather than passive consumers.

So while feeling overwhelmed is understandable, please don’t let it extinguish the excitement you may feel about the wonderful possibilities there are in today’s classrooms.

For those of you who were unable to attend Warlick’s session, it was awesome! Here are some his resource links.

http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?p=254

http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OSOWSessionOutline

http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurStudentsOurWorlds

That means that about half of the students in your classes are posting pictures and videos as well as writing for fun on the Internet.

Given our district’s initiative to raise our SAT scores, I can’t help but wonder how we could use Web 2.0 tools to help us in that endeavor. If kids are already online writing on their own, and writing helps improve literacy, what can we do to harness this for school?

There are lots of Web 2.0 tools that incorporate writing and blogging is one such tool. Blogs are very easy to set up and use. Here is a video from Commoncraft that explains blogging “in plain English”.

If you are interested in setting up a class blog, contact your friendly ITRT!

Download Video: Posted by cputnam809 at TeacherTube.com.

You set the stage for you lesson by introducing the blog (or wiki, or podcast, or any other Web 2.0 teaching tool) that you’ve integrated into the day’s lesson. You look out into the their eyes, expecting to see looks of appreciation for your awesome lesson planning creativity. Instead, you get nothing but blank stares–nada, nothing, zip. Where is the excitement for technology that your ITRT and the experts have promised will be there?

Yes, it does happen. In spite of the studies that tell us that our students know more about and are more comfortable with techology than any of us born before 1990 could ever hope to be, the fact is that we do have kids who are still wading in the shallows rather than riding the technology tidal wave. And that’s OK.

David Warlick wrote about this recently in his post, Such a Quiet Revolution. In it he wrote, ”Today’s change is fast. I suspect, aside from great cataclysms, faster than any at time before. But it’s not so fast that it really stirs up the wind.” And that’s what we have–a technology revolution that’s moving rapidly, but the winds of change are more like a whispering breeze rather than a hurricane gale.

Does that mean we should give up on technology? Of course not. Just because some of our students are still waders, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t learn to swim. According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, technology needs to be an integral part in our students’ education if we hope for them to be able to compete in today’s global economy.

So what does this mean for teachers? It means that in spite of the occasional blank stares, don’t feel disheartened. Like virtually everything we do in teaching, we just have to keep trying. It’s hard to imagine, but just a few years ago “surfing” meant something totally different and “googling” and “blogging” were gibberish. Things are changing. Our kids WILL “get it”.

They have to.