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If we go back to my cooking analogy, the implications are that providing teachers with a recipe, or a general overview of Web 2.0 tools, is not going to lead to success in the classroom or with administration.  Teachers need to understand the basic foundations of these tools, what they can do, why they are important, and how to locate the appropriate tool for individual learning scenarios.  I believe this basic premise is true regardless of the technological or pedagogical proficiency of the instructor.

Most importantly, I want to emphasize as much as I can, that we need to not promote Web 2.0 as the future of education or learning.  In fact, it is highly likely Web 2.0 will not even exist when today’s junior high students enter college or the work force.  There are many many web-based tools that can greatly enhance learning today, but need to be used with consideration of how that application affects learning.  When I see people state learners need to use these tools because they will experience them in the work place, I just cringe. They may use them in the work place, or they may not.  If they do, employers typically want to train them on their own systems.  An employer is much more interested in an employee able to communicate proficiently, locate and critically evaluate information, and build strong internal and external customer relationships.  Employers and universities don’t care if a student knows how to use a wiki or make a youtube video.  General literacy is much more important than knowledge of specific web platforms.  Some of the skills we promote as 21st century literacies will not exist five years from now.  There are some excellent frameworks for promoting literacy and I’m excited to see them promoted more fully.

t’s possible (and often happens) to spend an entire teaching career having no real contact with what’s happening in businesses and organizations outside of academia, making it more difficult for teachers to connect what happens in their classrooms to the real world.

Lisa Parisi This morning I came here before I went to twitter. This seems to be the place to be right now. Still not sure of all the groupings, taggings, etc. Reading what everyone writes and hoping to get it soon

Will play on Sunday with Karen McMillan and Alice Barr. Anyone else want to join? Anyone want to teach?

Ryan Bretag I'll join in the fun if you'll have me. Let me know time when you know.

Over 35,000 spelling words and eight spelling games!- A REAL person who says each word and sentence- Thousands of free spelling lists. Or save your own!- A free forum and newsletter with more resources!

Video is indeed a 21st century skill

t requires teacher training to make it as required as learning how to teach writing.

Any job that features communication as a primary skill, will ask future employees to present themselves in this way.

To me it really brought home how artificial speeches about canned subjects in front of a class are little to no preparation about talking to people naturally in a real-world setting. It’s like the students are only good at “pretend speaking”

(These types of schooly speeches also unconsciously perpetuate the teacher-centered model of 20th century classrooms, with students being trained to carry that largely stultifying ritual into the future.) 

Ours is a century of sharing ideas, and sharing the stage, with the audience. (I’ll resist the Speech 2.0 label.)

That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.