Group items tagged

In the past two+ years, I've read and bookmarked almost 3,500 websites that I wanted to keep. I've also highlighted the interesting passages on them, and written margin-notes about those highlights - all without printing the pages

I've also put all 3,500 websites in a file cabinet - without printing them out - that I can access anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

And I've placed each bookmarked site in multiple folders with individual labels, so I can see everything I've saved about, say, NCLB, or Creationism, or the Cold War, or stuff that made me laugh, on one online page.

Picture a bus. Your students are standing in the front; most teachers (maybe even you) are in the back, hanging on to the seat straps as the bus careens down the road under the guidance of kids who have never been taught to steer and who are figuring it out as they go.

In short, for a host of reasons, we're failing to empower kids to use one of the most important technologies for learning that we've ever had. One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely. The new literacy means being able to function in and leverage the potential of easy-to-create, collaborative, transparent online groups and networks, which represent a "tectonic shift" in the way we need to think about the world and our place in it (Shirky, 2008). This shift requires us to create engaged learners, not simply knowers, and to reconsider the roles of schools and educators.

As the geeky father