Looking for ideas for a presentation on Web 2.0 and new web apps for teachers

February 22, 2009 5:25 PM

What should I include in a presentation about new internet technology and digital media in the classroom to a group of high school teachers?

I have volunteered to run two different sessions at my schools PD day tomorrow. I have a general list of topics that I would like to cover, but I'm sure that there are others that I will forget.

I am looking to get people thinking about blogging in the classroom and incorporating things such as social networking (i.e. facebook, twitter) as well as the usefullness of such things as RSS feeds and readers, and photo/video sharing

The two workshops are described as follows:

First one: Web 2.0 and the "New" Internet

Participants will be introduced to a wide variety of new internet applications and technologies, and will engage in discussions around implementing them in a classroom setting. Workshop is hands-on, and participants will have the chance to experiment with the applications of their choice.

Second one: Digital Media in the classroom

Participants will work on various types of digital media and learn how to produce and deliver electronic content to their students. Topics may include but are not limited to: Digital Images and Video, Podcasting and Vodcasting, Blogging, Wikis and various social networking applications.


I am open to ideas on both the application side (i.e. show them this, do this) and the more philosophical side (i.e. this changes how we do this, why this is important)

The sessions are about 1.5 hours each. I will be in a computer lab with an LCD projector and every participant will have access to a computer.

Thanks. I will likely show them this question and any answers as an example of how user generated content has changed the internet.

posted by davey_darling to education (4 answers total)

Wikis. And not just wikipedia but the idea of students contributing to a class wide wiki. This is easly done through websites like wikispaces A friend of mine has done this with all his classes and the results have been very fruitful. Students' homework was centered on building up the wiki. And they would get credit for making 3 significant edits and creating articles about the cultural capital embedded through the books they read.
posted by saxamo at 5:33 PM on February 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

You want digital cameras galore. Give them each an assignment: - each teacher will be writing a lesson plan.

Here are the details:
They will be assigned another teacher at random.
They will take a/some pictures.
They will write a lesson plan around integrated digital media and create the exemplar.
They will upload the exemplar, the assignment and a rubric.
They will create space for a real/fictitious student body to post their work.

You will facilitate. You know the worst part? Getting the cameras hooked up and working. No, I'm lying. The worst part is dealing with the teachers who have calcified and will not do anything around technology and are present because they have to be to earn their PDPs.

For the rest, you are facilitating the creation of authentic curriculum. This kind of assignment can be adapted to many disciplines. It can be done for Language Arts and foreign language (easy! it's the writing!). It can be for physics (demonstrate types of forces). It can be for biology (pictures demonstrating clear phenotypes). It can be for phys ed/health (demonstrate posture, exercise positions, etc). It can be for history (biographical sketch - how to interview someone). Math is probably the hardest since math is abstract, but it could be pictures of classes of curves.

Whatever you do, if you don't have a good answer for "how can I do this in *my* classroom?" you will lose 1/3 of your audience who will write you off as a snake oil salesman.

Disclaimer: I used to be a technology administrator (2001 - 2004). I set up the facility for teachers to publish documents to a subsection the school web site by dropping them in their own personal network folder. They drop files or even do a save as HTML from Word into their folder and a robot would pick it up, carry it over the firewall and ftp it up to the ISP. The teachers I expected to get it, got it right away. I spent, and I wish I was making this up, the majority of the session explaining and re-explaining what a network folder was and how to get to it. After the session, I checked to see how many teachers were using this and even though publishing things to the web was considered a desirable and needed skill in a survey filled out by these same teachers, it was a 100% failure rate. Now, at the same time, I was teaching students a class in web design and they used exactly the same system. They had a 100% success rate. This is one of the things that you will be up against.
posted by plinth at 6:12 PM on February 22, 2009

CIS 339 is doing interesting things with Google Apps in a Bronx middle school.

Two 90 minute sessions is not much time to teach a group of people computer topics. Assuming it's the same group for both sessions, I would spend the first session briefly reviewing topics and going over case studies of other schools that implemented them. Figure out what the teachers want to know more about. In the second session, you could go into details for the topic/application most important to them.
posted by gaelenh at 9:00 PM on February 22, 2009

A lot of people have found the site I work for via what seems to be a great program: "23 Things" related to Learning 2.0. It's a semi-structured set of activities for teachers that covers a good range of Web 2.0 products and digital media concepts: blogging, Flickr, RSS, LibraryThing, Delicious, wikis, YouTube, etc.
posted by dreamyshade at 3:59 AM on February 23, 2009