Jul
13
Thing 13: Online Conferences
July 13, 2008 | Tagged online_conferences, Web_2.0 | Leave a Comment
This is an incredible resource. I went to a workshop called “Web 2.0 Classroom” given by Anne Davis who teaches at Georgia State University. She gave brief descriptions of many of the tools we have been learning about with links to actual classrooms using these tools. It made all of this very practical and real. I think we are going to be learning about these tools in this course, but to see the student work makes the work I personally have to do as a teacher more tangible.
I have been putting a great deal of thought into how a Web 2.0 classroom and a writing workshop classroom can be synergistic. I think it all starts, as we did, with the blog. The posting of thoughts, reflections, facts, stories, questions, etc. which circle around essential questions. It branches out to the classroom wiki which collects all of our work and makes it available to the community. The computer is the extension of the “writer’s notebook” and puts into action our plans.
There was one tool Anne Davis linked to which describes the use of scribe posts in the classroom. The scribe post is a way to chronicle daily classroom life, and includes what happened in class, homework, links to the wiki. The scribe posts becomes a kind of textbook. Each day a different student is the scribe, and is responsible for posting the day’s work so that if a student was absent he/she could understand what happened and what work was missed. This type of writing works very well with the type of writing I call “learning logs.” The same kind of thinking that I teach for using the writer’s notebook as a tool for thinking, is out there and shared.
