Technology in Education

Yesterday’s tragedy in Virginia outlines this dichotomy between school and student life.  Students needed access to information and used their laptops to access Facebook, wikipedia, and other user edited sites.  The growth of the wikipedia entry about the massacre is amazing. Serious discussion about sources, citations, resources is going on in real time.

Students used their phone to videotape the incident.  Journalists from around the world used these websites and video as primary sources.  Anyone, anywhere, at anytime can be a journalist, editor, and creator of documents.  In almost all high schools today we ban phones, Facebook, editing wikipedia, even though society recognizes these skills as essential.  This is how schools are risking irrelevancy.

Have students become the educational leaders? Have they left us behind?

Technorati Tags: vatech wikipedia education k12

This is a long story that I will shorten considerably.  My school did not have a wikipedia entry.  We created one as a class project.  One specific editor became very concerned with the page development.

I am now in a dispute with him about including a link to ratemyteacher on the school wikipedia entry.  He insists that it is a “uniquely powerful aggregation tool”.  I disagree.

A good project for us bloggers/editors may be to visit the wikipedia entry for rate my teacher and chime in and improve this entry.  Just a thought…

Technorati Tags: wikipedia ratemyteacher

So I started this last night and already got a comment.  Thats a good sign.  I had a  radio gig when I was in college.  One semester I had the 6-8am slot on Sunday morning.  The only thing that saved me was that a friend said she got up and read while she listened to me.  Otherwise I thought I was talking to myself.

I’m going to try to set up the blog some today.  Not sure what cool tools from my class blog that I can bring over here.  I really enjoy the clustrmap, as do the kids.  And I haven’t quite figured out how the tags work over here.  I will find the FAQ files today, thats for sure.

If someone is looking for something to do they can look at my final project.  I’ve not taught this class before and I am trying to set-up a two week end of semester final thing for this introductory web design class.  I’m starting to get wikis, but the collaboration hasnt taken off yet.  If you want to see a cool wiki my kids did, visit this site or this one (in progress).

Technorati Tags: web2.0 wiki blog Wordpress