23 Things: Thing 23

Take a few moments to reflect on your journey. You've covered a lot of material over the past ten weeks. What does it all mean? How has your thinking changed between Thing 1 and Thing 23?
I'm glad that I took this course even though I had used or heard of most of the "things" that we covered because I found, as I expected, that there was a lot more that I didn't know. I found that even the tools that I was using I wasn't using in the way that the Web 2.0 envisioned them to be used - in a truly collaborative sense. I also hadn't had time to really think through how some of these tools, like a wiki, could really get students to work together to create real, sustained knowledge in a content area. We also should remember that teamwork is still one of the crucial parts of every workplace and collaborative learning gets student ready for that type of work environment.


Has this program changed how you view the Internet or how view education in the digital world? What plans have you made for using these tools in and out of the classroom? How will you continue to learn about Web 2.0 tools? What are your big "take aways" from this experience?

One thing that's funny is that I was using many of the Web 2.0 tools for my personal use but hadn't extended them to my professional life. This program has helped me by giving me a wide variety of examples of how other educators and professionals are using Web 2.0 to enrichen their lives both personally and professionally. First and foremost, I hope this year I will bring to my classroom a collaborative mindset. I think that I have to start by creating a collaborative culture and then use the tools that this program has introduced to me to make the collaboration an integral part to our learning. I hope to especially develop and use my wiki and to make better use of blogging than I did last year. I think that, for some units, social bookmarking could prove useful as well. Right now I find sites and store them in Netrekker for my class to use but it usually becomes a tool for me to quickly retrieve a site to show something through the LCD projector. Kind of one sided. But with social bookmarking we could all help to find and store sites that would be useful not to mention we could have the help of our parents who are a great resource.

The biggest idea that I will take away from this class is that collaboration is where the world is headed. It used to be a nice thing to do and we all knew it worked well but not every workplace was a collaborative one. Now, it is becoming a requirement in almost all facets of our world. Teamwork is now even more crucial of a skill than ever before and, although people want to blame technology for destroying social etiquette and grammar, I think that soon our younger generation will begin to feel the pressure of the permanence of the web and the opposite effect will occur. We will begin to be even more careful than ever before about what we put out in the world.

Thank you for this learning opportunity and I hope it continues to be offered!