Smethurst, Lois LA - 1 - 12/11/08

Convert Your Web Page to Web 2.0 and Your Staff Along with it. 

Table of Contents 

Convert Your Web Page to Web 2.0 and Your Staff Along with it. ..............................................................1 Part 1: The People: .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Part 2:Community  & Communication........................................................................................................................................................ 1 Part 3:The Solution:............................................................................................................................................................................................ 2 What Do the Experts Say About Web2.0 Technology in Education............................................................................................... 3 BEGINNING BLOGGERS .................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Difficulties and Possible Solutions ............................................................................................................................................................... 6 In Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 7 

Bibliogaphy................................................................................................................................................8 

Part 1: The People: 

Since discovering web2.0 (blogging, online personal learning networks, wikis) I can't help but feel all teachers should know and use these tools. I'm not sure if it is part of human nature that we have to share and bring others onboard to think the way we do because it is reaffirming or because we believe it is important and our duty to nurture our peers. I feel there is an urgency to inform teachers about the online world that at the moment they seem blissfully unaware of. So much is going on in the "webasphere" especially in education, that if teachers are not connected then I fear they are being left behind and can only provide an outdated education program. What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is not a new invention but a shift in the use and capabilities of the World Wide Web. Previously the Internet was used mostly to retrieve information but now, due to changes in the software, users can easily and without technical knowledge participate as contributors, collaborate online and have access to online software.

“These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies (the practice of catgorising content through tags).” (Stilton Studios, 2008)

Teachers and students who participate in Web 2.0 have powerful tools to construct knowledge, collaborate locally and globally and to be creative (think, create and communicate).

Part 2:Community  & Communication  

The web site at our school is professionally designed and provides lots of information for parents and prospective families about the history of the school, the curriculum it offers, newsletters, contact details etc. However the communication is directed one way- out to the community. Even then only one or two people in the school have the technical knowledge required to upload information. Putting student work on the web page for viewing is limited by the time it takes one person to do it and without any avenue for feedback, one wonders if anyone even sees it.

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Part 3:The Solution:  

To solve both problems I believed we could convert the web page to weblogs and by giving the staff ownership of their own class blog they would begin to learn about web 2.0. This sounds simple, but of course there are many complications and responsibilities when you combine publishing material to the wider community, students work, and multiple teachers with a wide range of skills and knowledge.

• Student safety and privacy, • school integrity, and • teacher’s professional image

…all have to be considered and protected. And this is a big change in the underlying philosophy of the school, which until now has had almost complete control of material, which was published or written to the school community. The school now has to consider the digital identity that it is creating.

The Victorian Department of Education has links to documents, advise and help guides for schools and teachers who want to start their own web 2.0 pages. I have linked to some of the material in the following table.

Documents School Must Have Documentation Teachers Should Read

Internet Acceptable Use Policy for Students Copyright Information Sheet for Schools(National Copyright Unit, 2008)

Student Images Agreement Student safety and blogging(DEECD, 2008)

Acceptable Use Policy for School (or Department’s) ICT Systems

Global Teacher - Blog Directory and Web 3.0 Community(Global Teacher)

It is important to have the essential cyber safety rules and protocols in place before starting weblogs to protect student online identity. For example

• Student photos if the student can be easily recognized will not be used • Only first name and grade, or initials, or an online name will be used • All comments will be moderated by the teacher before appearing on the page

In our trial period we decided to follow the Department’s(DEECD, 2008) advice with becoming “proficient with your own teacher blog” (DEECD, 2008) before creating any student blogs. From my own experience the best way to understand how blogging can facilitate learning is to have your own blog and this is one time I think it is important for teachers to have prior learning before introducing it to their students.

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What Do the Experts Say About Web2.0 Technology in Education   

Steve Hargadon- “Web 2.0 is the future of Education” (Hargadon, 2008)

Hargadon is director of the K12 Open Technologies Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the founder of Classroom 2.0. The social network Classroom 2.0 has over 13,000 members who are(Classroom 2.0, 2008) interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. He is well respected and very active in writing and speaking about Web 2.0 issues relating to education.

Hargadon believes “that the “read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. (Hargadon, 2008)

He identifies ten trends that have particular importance for education and learning. I have summarized and combined the trends into categories that I think will make sense and be relevant to our school situation.

Information, collaboration and opportunity are part of our core business as educators. We have a responsibility and a moral obligation as teachers to help students access the tools they will need to make sense of their real and online world. Web2.0 is already part of all forms of modern communication, providing access and opportunities now and in the future so it must be included in the school curriculum.

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David Warlick is an educator, author and consultant in educational technology. He is a strong supporter of Web 2.0 and advocates that teachers take advantage of the unique capabilities of the technology.

“David Warlick has been an innovator and leader in the field of educational technology and a prolific programmer. His classroom blogging site, Class Blogmeister, serves more than 100,000 users, and his attribution tool, Citation Machine, receives more than a half-million page views a day.”(Warlick D. , 2006, p. Bio)

“Blogs have grown like a range fire and they have exerted amazing influence on our lives, causing us to redefine journalism and political activism. Blogs also hold enormous potential for education as teachers and administrators have a new avenue for informing and inviting the broader learning community and for students as they learn to communicate by becoming part of the global conversation.”(Warlick D. F., 2005, p. 5)

He discusses the way our economic system has changed from the Agricultural Age through the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age that we have today. He explains how and why the curriculum must change to address the nature of information that is a result of technology.

He groups the Web 2.0 outcomes into three purposeful areas for educators and students. Collaboration, communication and information are three essential elements for rich inquiry based classrooms. There is no easier way to achieve these elements than to use the web 2.0 technology.

“Today, the world is a different place. Our sense of the future has changed, our students are different, and the very nature of information has changed. Technology has advanced at a rate that would have been unbelievable to me when I was growing up. As a result, there is a fundamental question that faces us today, as educators and as communities. What do children need to be learning today? ..and How do they need to be learning it?”(Warlick D. , 2006, p. Welcome)

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BEGINNING BLOGGERS We had a clear purpose, and support from the school leadership to move forward on the weblogs. Once we started our blogs, eleven in all, it became clear that we needed some guidelines to define the tone and purpose of the class blog pages. One of the surprising comments from teacher who looked at the work the others were doing but wasn't actually a participant was that “this could be used by parents to compare teachers.” Clearly this wasn't the tone that we wanted. In retrospect and for the future the main philosophy /guiding principals should be:

• The class blogs are collective blogs to give you and your students a voice and a way to communicate with the local and global community. [For example if you browse through “ejourney with technokids” you can see the opportunities that Web 2.0 has opened up for communicating and collaborating. According to the interview transcript shown on the blog, the students particularly enjoy talking to students in another country. (Mirtschin, 2008)]

• The class blog is an avenue for students' to construct meaning through reflection and sharing their learning with an authentic audience. [TaNuj^’s Weblog is an excellent example of a student reflection (TaNuj^’s, 2008) It is also for teachers as can be seen by Dean Groom’s response to the student blog. (Groom, 2008)]

• The blog can add impetus to the Inquiry Process through collaboration with experts in the field. [In M3’s blog on Sustainability the students each give their ideas in their own words adding to the knowledge of the individual.(Freeman, 2008)]

• It is an opportunity to showcase your grade and the work that you and your students do, and to keep parents and the community informed.

However the impact was immediate. The communication in the first few blogs was far more than had gone home in the past year. It was visual, informative and varied according to the class, just as each class is different each blog had an individual feel to it and the added bonus was that the first comments were from students. [http://berwicklodgeps.edublogs.org]

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Difficulties and Possible Solutions •

Difficulties Possible Work Arounds

TIM

E

The trouble is that to make a blog work really well you need to be passionate about it. The teachers who are at the forefront of blogs are the ones who appear to work at them in every spare minute of their time. I'm sure that blogging can be successful without this type of commitment but I can see that teachers who are cooperative rather than passionate are going to find this a frustrating experience! (Just try embedding a video or two onto your blog and see what I mean.)

Making posts needs to be seen as part of the daily work in the classroom. It can’t be left to the teacher once the student has completed the product. Once teachers have developed confidence in posting student work they will be able to loosen the reins and let students have some responsibility for the blog too. A collaborative blog can have more than one editor with the ultimate control for publishing still with the teacher. and I think this is an excellent way to work in primary schools.

SKIL

LS

The technical skills in creating a blog vary quite a bit depending on what you want to do. Even though web 2.0 sites are designed so that anyone can publish their work to the web there is still a long way to go in simplifying the process of uploading multimedia. How are we going to support teachers who are struggling with integrating ICT into their classroom to come to grips with technical jargon such as mp4 vs wmv?

Support groups, such for beginning bloggers that meet at lunchtime for half an hour just to help the teachers who are newbies. The teachers who have some experience are available to help less experienced teachers. We could train the highly able students to be “tech team” support to that we eventually will have student blogging mentors.

AU

DIE

NC

E

Creating content is just the first part of successful blogging. It has to be two-way communication if it is going to meet the criteria of supporting students in constructing their knowledge. So soliciting an authentic audience for their blog is another hurdle.

The blogging competition by Sue Wyatt and Sue Waters(Wyatt, 2008) has been a fantastic way for students to establish networks, links and an audience. If teachers get involved in global projects which I think they will now that they have a collaboration tool (i.e. blog) they will soon have “blogging buddies”

CO

NTE

NT

How do we store and manage the student products such as podcasts and videos so that they are accessible to our blog. PodOmatic, Gcast, TeacherTube and Edublogs.tv all offer a free limited hosting service, which is adequate for most teachers. However each teacher has to create an account for each of these services and upload the work, and then link or embed the files in the blog.

Our technician claims that he can set up a “tame” server at our school to host our video and sound files. This would mean that embedded files would not be blocked at school as they at present. Uploading would cost less because it would be “in house’ and we do not have to create accounts.

SUST

AIN

AB

ILIT

Y Sustainability will be one of the biggest issues. Teachers are

always busy, so it will be important that they find these tools improve student’s learning and create opportunities to be creative and collaborative.

Blogging topics and ideas, essential questions, and collaboration projects can be included as part of unit plan activities. The grade levels can have similar Blog topics and like the student blogging competition run by Sue Waters and Sue Wyatt (Wyatt, 2008) teachers can set blogging tasks for the students to improve their skills. Creating international connections with global projects would be another way to instantly see benefits for blogs.

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In Conclusion 

My initial idea sounded like a simple solution to a problem. Now I understand how complex it really is and how much work there is still to do. I also understand that it was absolutely necessary to take this step, ..leap, …plunge into web 2.0. In fact I find it difficult to image a classroom that should not be using the web 2.0 tools in some way. I am inclined to agree with Hargadon when he said it was bigger than the printing press.! One last example of web 2.0 in education, and perhaps my favourite, is an infant grade in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. The students have pre-service teachers as blogging buddies. The student teachers follow one child(Cassidy, Mrs. Cassidy's Classroom Blog, 2008)’s writing throughout the year, responding to the child’s blogs, but noting the development in writing over the year. A win win situation all around. In an interview Cassidy explains what she does in her classroom and how each student has a blog, which is an online portfolio, and how blogging buddies work with her students. (Cassidy, WOW2 Show #91, 2008). Clearly Cassidy is an outstanding educator with very good technological skill. She has many awards to her credit, but Cassidy has shown that student age is no barrier to using Web 2.0 tools with students and how powerful it can be for communicating, creating and collaborating.

Additional Helpful Links http://deangroom.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-3rs-are-now-the-3ts/ http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2006/09/posting_student.html

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Bibliogaphy Cassidy, K. (2008, Nov 12). Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Mrs. Cassidy's Classroom Blog: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337&l=1226474672

Cassidy, K. (2008, Sept 24). WOW2 Show #91. Kathy Cassidy. (S. Peters, & J. Wagner, Interviewers) Classroom 2.0. (2008). Main. (Hargadon, Producer) Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Classroom 2.0: http://www.classroom20.com/ DEECD. (2008, Oct 21). Teacher > Global > Blogs. (S. o. (DEECD), Producer) Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Department of Education and Early Childhood Development State Government of Victoria - logo Skip to content Overall menu: : http://www.education.vic.gov.au/teacher/Global/blogs.htm#H2N10068

Freeman, E. (2008, Sept 5th). Sustainability. Retrieved Nov 12th, 2008, from M3's Class Blog: http://m3rbs.21classes.com/archive/2008/09/05/what-is-sustainability.htm

Global Teacher. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Global Teacher - Blog Directory and Web 3.0 Community: http://globalteacher.org.au/

Groom, D. (2008, Nov 11). Home. Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Teaching and Learning Design: http://deangroom.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/student-strikes-back/

Hargadon, S. (2008, July 25). Web 2.0 is the Future of Education. Retrieved November 2008, from Steve Hargadon K-12 educational technology: collaborative web technologies, free and open source software, and the future of education. : http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/07/web-20-is-future-of-education-talk.html Mirtschin, A. (2008, Nov 5). My Live BLog. Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from ejourney with technokids: http://murch.globalteacher.org.au/join-in-me-in-a-live-blog/ National Copyright Unit. (2008). Information Sheets/Schools. Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Smartcopying The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE: http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/pid/846

Stilton Studios. (2008). Glossary. Retrieved November 12, 2008, from Stilton Studios: http://www.stiltonstudios.net/glossary.htm#w

TaNuj^’s. (2008, Nov 11). Fun with Mixed Learning. Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from TaNuj^’s Weblog: http://tkak.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/fun-mixed-with-learning/

Warlick, D. (2006). Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from CoLearners: http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?page_id=3

Warlick, D. F. (2005). Raw Materials for the Mind. Raleigh, North Carolina, USA: The Landmark Project. Wyatt, S. (2008, 08 14). Student Blogging Competition starts September. Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Miss W. and her Smartboard: http://tasteach.edublogs.org/2008/08/14/student-blogging-competition-starts-september-2008/#comment-219