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Educational Origami is a blog, and a wiki, about the integration of ICT into the classroom, this is one of the largest challenges that I feel we as teachers face. Marc Prensky coined the now popular and famous phrase "Digital natives and digital immigrants" in his two papers on digital Children. We the teachers are the immigrants and our students are the natives, brought up in a world where there has always been computers and the internet, where information is always instant and varied.I made this wiki on request from Miguel Guhlin after I blogged about matching ICT tools to traditional classroom practice and Bloom's Taxonomy.

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.

I also believe that a very important step lies in getting library boards, school boards, and other trustees/governing bodies on board with Web 2.0 ideas as well as the changes we are discussing here.

I think school libraries will also need to work to firmly re-establish themselves as the foundation of instructional practice. The library space will become more flexible, perhaps moving toward the idea of a university-like information commons with mainly digital non-fiction and reference collections, but still possessing high-quality fiction and picture-book sections. School libraries can work to embrace new technologies and become the iPod content hubs as well as the place for books. The school librarian will also become more flexible – moving in and out of the library and classrooms as a curriculum and instructional pedagogy-consultant teacher. As education works to meet the needs of the so-called "21st-century learners," school librarians will have a key role in supporting an increased demand for information literacy and knowledge management throughout the content areas.

Brown's class was discussing some of the whaling calculations in Moby Dick. When one student asked a question involving a complex computation, three students quickly pulled out their cell phones and did the math. Brown was surprised to learn that most cell phones have a built-in calculator. She was even more surprised at how literate her students were with the many functions included in their phones. She took a quick poll and found that all her students either had a cell phone or easy access to one. In fact, students became genuinely engaged in a class discussion about phone features. This got Brown thinking about how she might incorporate this technology into learning activities.

Brown noticed that many students used text messaging to communicate, and considered how she might use cell phones in summarizing and analyzing text to help her students better understand Richard III. Effective summarizing is one of the most powerful skills students can cultivate. It provides students with tools for identifying the most important aspects of what they are learning, especially when teachers use a frame of reference (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Summarizing helps students identify critical information. Research shows gains in reading comprehension when students learn how to incorporate isummary framesi (series of questions designed to highlight critical passages) as a tool for summarizing (Meyer & Freedle, 1984). When students use this strategy, they are better able to understand what they are reading, identify key information, and provide a summary that helps them retain the information (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987).

To manage the learning project, Brown asked a tech-savvy colleague to help her build a simple weblog. Once it was set up, it took Brown and her students 10 minutes in the school's computer lab to learn how to post entries. The weblog was intentionally basic. The only entries were selected passages from text of Richard III and Brown's six narrative-framing questions. Her questions deliberately focused students' attention on key passages. If students could understand these passages well enough to summarize them, Brown knew that their comprehension of the play would increase.