The Definitive Guide To School 2.0

Here it is: the way I believe we should teach students in a web 2.0 world. 

(I posted about this topic back in April and again in June.  Read those posts if you haven’t already done so to set the scene for this one.)

Our kids are living in a world that is very different than the world we adults grew up in.  As a result, today’s kids are fundamentally different people and learners than we are.  This was first explored in an outstanding essay entitled ”Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” by Marc Prensky.  A PDF file of that essay can be found here.  Please read it.

In the past few years, “Web 2.0″ has been a popular term to categorize the interactive elements that have become so popular on the web.  Kids don’t expect web pages to be brochures that they can simply read; they expect to be able to use the sites they visit to post comments, edit the actual site’s content, search for things, create things, and otherwise interact with the site. In 2001, in the aforementioned article, Mr. Prensky defined a fundamental shift in the way kids think: their thinking was faster, involved more random order, involved parallel processing and multi-tasking, and was extremely visual-based and kinesthetic-based (and not auditory). By 2007, all of this remains true (even more so today than six years ago), but there’s an additional component to add to all of this: Kids EXPECT to be able to interact with and at least partially control their own learning.  Kids demand that the content they are learning must be relevant NOW.  Kids expect their work to be meaningful and intended for a real purpose and audience.

Busywork was never OK, but today’s kids are literally unable to put up with it.  Their minds NEED to go faster, to do relevant work, and to have some control over what is being asked of them.  What many teachers interpret as misbehavior or impulsivity (or ADHD) is a real physical change in the human brain.

We cannot expect our students to change.  We must change.  Here’s how to make your classroom compatible with the Web 2.0 generation.  (Important sidenote: Notice that most of these are about how we teach and don’t require technology at all.  Many people get too hung up on finding the newest educational website, when what they need is a new teaching style.)

1.  Go faster.  Most teachers talk too much, repeat themselves a great deal, and go over things far too slowly.  Do you feel like you have to say things two or three times because your students don’t listen well?  Start saying everything once and they’ll listen better.

Notice that “go faster” doesn’t mean “go to harder material right away.”

2.  Make the subject matter meaningful to the students.  You MUST show them why the topic matters.  If it doesn’t matter, quit teaching it, no matter what the standards say.

3.  Design (virtually) every assignment around a real purpose and a specific audience. (More on this topic can be found in this post.)  If you need to occasionally do something “fake” like practice cursive letter formations, remind the students of how that skill will be meaningfully utilized in future “real” projects.

4.  Differentiate as much as you possibly can.  You can differentiate the content that you are teaching, the process by which you are teaching it, and/or the product that the students will create to demonstrate their mastery of that topic.  This will allow you to adjust for students’ ability levels and learning styles, and it will also give you a way to give students the kinds of meaningful choices they need to feel like they control their learning.

5.  Utilize Web 2.0 technology.  Ideas of this include the following:

*Start a classroom store at www.cafepress.com to allow your students to turn their art projects into real items, then use the proceeds to purchase items for your classroom or to donate to a charity that your students have researched. 

*Publish student writing at www.lulu.com.  Submit your students’ best writing to other online and offline publishers like The Write Source or Stone Soup magazine.

*Use a classroom blog.  Give your students permission to create posts and comment on others’ posts.  Use pseudonymns or keep the blog private if security issues are a concern.  (My favorite Web 2.0 story about this: My students were blogging about their favorite books.  One girl wrote a gushing review of a not-very-well-known book.  The next day the author herself commented, thanking my student for her kind post.)

*Use online games as a free and easy differentiation tool.  There is NO reason to have all of your students playing the same difficulty level of the same online math game — if ever there was a time where differentiation was simple, this is it.

*Use the vast amount of materials offered on sites like edhelper.com to create tiered assignments and other differentiation options for your students.

*Advanced: Create BRIEF podcasts about key topics from your class.  Put these online so your students can access them at any time as a remediation tool or an enrichment opportunity.  This will help you to adjust the pacing of your teaching for various student needs — you can be working with a group of students while an advanced group who already understands that topic listens to a podcast of something they don’t already understand.

Disclaimer: Many people try implementing one of the tech ideas from #5 above, such as blogging, without adapting their instruction in any other way.  That is worthless.  Asking your students to blog toward a meaningless prompt is pointless — don’t let the inclusion of Web 2.0 technology fool you into thinking you’re being innovative.  You’re not.