One of the professional action learning teams we run in the Sunraysia Mallee Schools Network is the “New Tools & New Media” team, which is basically the Web2.0 team. But if I used that term, most teachers wouldn’t know what I was on about!
This year’s team is another great group of committed teachers willing to try new learning in their classrooms. The big difference I’m noticing with this new team is that those teachers with either a Facebook or MySpace account seem to understand ‘virtual spaces’ and communicating online so much better. No surprise I suppose? But the teachers involved in this form of social networking seem to ‘grok‘ the whole ‘collaboration, connection & communication’ thing, that is so important when trying to understand the value of web2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, podcasts etc).
Teachers are comfortable commenting to a Moodle forum or a blog, adding a voice annotation to Voice thread or sharing their knowledge by uploading to a ‘team space’ on the Moodle or a wiki. It’s great, it makes my job so much easier.
So thank you MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Ning, and the the thousands of other ’social networking’ tools that help people understand that we live in a global community where these types of conservations can take place for both socialising and learning. I’m sure our students won’t mind being involved in more online learning with their ’social networking’ savvy teacher.
Photo credit: Leigh Blackall
April 24th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
An interesting observation ICTguy. I noticed the same thing just today. I worked with a wonderful group of teachers who had limited experience with online environments. One teacher in the group had her own Facebook account and was able to share her enthusiasm and transfer the skills across to Classroom 2.0 and Edublogs. Everyone made a great start to their web 2.0 journey.
Loving this role:-)
Helen