Thing #5

What does school 2.0 mean to you?

School 2.0 is meant to represent the new age of technology in schools. School is taking on a whole new life due to the new advances in technology. Examples of this would include smartboards, blogging, social networks, or any other program that schools are beginning to use as a way to communicate the lessons with children.

What does it mean for schools of the future?

First of all, teachers are going to have to learn to stay on top of the advances in technology. The fact is that advances are being made all of the time. Teachers need to be able to use technology just as well if not better than the students they are teaching. Incoming teachers have an advantage compared to the current teachers because their classes are teaching them how to incorporate all of the new technologies for their classes. I do, however, have one concern about the school 2.0 revolution. Even as I was growing up, technology was starting to show itself in schools. Calculators were becoming more and more advanced, allowing students to do almost any form of mathematics on it. Some of my teachers told me later that many of these students were hurt by this advancement because without calculators, many of them aren't even able to do the most simple forms of math. New technology might make students so reliant on technology that it will leave them helpless if any of our technology ever crashes. We have to make sure that we incorporate technology into the lesson plans, but not let it consume them.

The websites I chose

I looked at the wikipedia article and the article titled, "Web 2.0 is not about version numbers or betas." Both of these helped me to get a better understanding about what they meant by school 2.0 and web 2.0. Wikipedia gives very literal definition for them. It includes what would be considered web 2.0. It included social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted sites, websites, mashups, and folksonomies. The other article helped me to get a view on how people feel about it, and not so much a technical definition. I loved when this website said that the web is like a foundation. It is meant to be built upon. This article discusses how web 2.0 is about the realization of the services on the web, not so much about the software. I completely agree with this. Many services have been available online for a while, but many people are just recently starting to discover them and how helpful they could be in the classroom. Many schools have been afraid of technology because of the cheating possibilities children have. I think they should try to embrace it. If children learn of ways to cheat, then there is more than likely a way to catch them using the same technology.