How to Start a ‘Teacher 2.0′ Career – Think Outside the Box (Part II)
Here comes the second part of my modest advices for a 2.0 career :
* Some videos to see: There are some videos that you come across everyday, on different online platforms if you are interested in searching about Web 2.0. Here are my ‘must’ suggestions for a healthy 2.0 career.
Did you know 3.0?:This widely viewed video by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod focuses on the incredible changes in technological world and how the digital generation react to this.
The Machine is Us/ing Us: This less than 5 minutes video tells us the evolotuion of the Web.
History of the Internet:This video is an animated documentary that explains the history of internet from the very beginning.
A Vision of Students of Today:This video summarizes the characteristic of 21st century students and enlightens us about how they learn, what they hope and wigh for. You can also watch A Vision of K-12 Students of Today.
What if?:Another video ogf Karl Fisch.It’s a look at the past and it argues the resistance to change in education.
A Brave New World-Wide Web:This video focuses on a teacher’s journey on the way of becoming a Web, connected and a collaborative teacher.
* Read the followings : You can read the following articles to have a better idea of how to become 21st century teacher and how to deal with digital native students.
Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants is Marc Prensky’s classics and a must-read article. It tells the things that we don’t know about our new students,Digital Natives; and about ourselves as Digital Immigrants. Here is the second part of it.
Moving Towards Web 2.0 in K-12 Education blog post discusses the impact of Web 2.0 in education.
You can also find so many other articles and blog entries of other educators from all over the world here.
* Start micro-blogging: Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that lets its users send brief and short updates to be viewed by other people and the most famous micro-blogging tool is Twitter. It’s a social networking and a micro-blogging site that allows its users to read each other’s 140 characters text-based posts; called tweets. I think, trying to express yourself using 140 letters is the fun way of using it.
You can send posts as often and as much as you want. You don’t have to answer the question ‘What are you doing?’, you can post about anything. You can introduce a new blog or a new blog post, share information, ask questions, share links and express your opinion, get instant feedback, track a conference or a seminar.The only thing you do is to get an account and start following people and learn from their tweets. Some great twitterers to follow: @NikPeachy, @SueWaters, @LarryFerlazzo, @Cogdog, @TomBarrett, @CoolCatTeacher, @C4lpt, @MissShonah, @ktenkely, @TamasLorincz and more you will find once you start using Twitter.
* Use social bookmarking to keep track: Once you dive into Web, you will find new links to discover, new blogs to read and share everyday. To keep track of what you are reading or searching, to store, manage, organize and even share your bookmarks of webpages, you should start using social bookmarking which means saving your favorite websites on internet by tagging (giving keywords) to them. Here are some of the social bookmarking sites that you can start saving your favourites and share with world : Digg, Delicious, Technorati , Blinklist,Diigo.
* Start your own blog: Now, it’s time to start your own blog to express your experience about teaching and learning, share knowledge and skills with others, influence other people the way they think. You can start your own blog using one of these sites Edublogs, Blogspot, WordPress. Happy Blogging!!
What I believe is that ‘Web’ has the potential to change people’s life, the way they look around. It’s just a small window to the whole world and it’s free, available 24/7 and it’s the best self-improvement tool around.
Next? * Integrate technology into your teaching. Engage your students: This is not only knowing and applying these tools but also improving a deeper understanding of the pedagogy when we engage ourselves and our students in using these tools.