First, let me start with something completely irrelevant…
Many years ago I watched a game of AFL football and saw the president of the losing club cry on national television…Now that’s passion! At the time I was working hard to extract a similar response from my English classes (No, I didn’t want them to cry!) I wanted them to care; I wanted them to get so caught up in a task they didn’t want to stop… I wanted passion! I developed a new found respect for that AFL team, Collingwood, (much to my family’s disgust) because I admire that sort of commitment and passion, no matter what its origin.
Passion in Education
Web 2.0 is also creating a lot of passion and excitement at the moment. I saw this first-hand today when I attended the SLAV conference ‘Re-imagining: Web 2.0 applications and implications’. I spent most of my time listening and nodding my head in agreement through each presentation. I did this a lot as I listened to Will Richardson speak of the challenges and opportunities ahead for educators. Put simply, schools must learn to compete with the virtual, world-wide web as it connects people with similar interests and passions daily. The learning opportunities are endless and students need guidance. Web 2.0 is changing the way society operates and connects; educators have to respond to this.
Jenny Luca, Toorak College, virtually described my own Web 2.0 journey (including the bit about spending Saturday nights on the web!). Jenny also reinforced my ideas about how teachers need to connect with Web 2.0 and educate themselves. Essentially…just do it! Start a blog or wiki, sign up for things, build a network with other passionate educators; there are lots of them out there.
Web 2.0: what’s in it for me? Or…What will I do tomorrow in my workplace to move forward with Web 2.0?
Pass on what I have learned to school leaders. Our leaders need to be able to see the potential here and if they don’t then it is my job to try to show them.
Supply a context for using Web 2.0. Suggest ways that Web 2.0 can be used to enhance learning at our school. Some ideas: Begin a VCE English theme wiki to encourage discussion and learning with other students from other schools studying these themes; do some serious ‘selling’ of my Literature Discovery Tour to show teachers what is possible; Begin a Voicethread project to encourage discussion of the CBCA shortlisted title.
Continue to arrange and present professional development sessions: igoogle; google docs; voicethreads; animito; scrapblogs (and my other discoveries) in a simple, short, non-threatening way.
Encourage individual exploration.
Get the students involved. Students love all this stuff; I have a group I call the ‘library legends’ who are currently creating avatars and alternative identities so they can contribute to a library blog.
Attempt to demystify Web 2.0 for parents and teachers. Send details of my blogs home to parents so they can look at them with their children.
Keep Learning. Continue to sign up for things, subscribe to blogs, comment a lot, start a wiki…etc. I’m not sure if it’s possible to be a Web 2.0 expert but I know it’s important for me to become a Web 2.0 explorer, learner and innovator.
Collingwood v Brisbane Flickr photograph by Judi Donovan
Hi there,
Maintain that passion. Excellent. I find I am enlightening/inspiring more teachers outside NSW than within. Perhaps I need to move to another state.
I have been reducing my use of the term Web 2.o and preferring the use of terms like read-write web. I find that technical terms can be problematical for some teachers. Web 2.o is already being supplanted with Web 3.0 in some areas. 😛
Cheers,
John
Hey Julie, wasn’t it great today. I am trying to write a post as well. You have done a great summary. Till next time,
Jo
I, too, am passionate about Web 2.0, but now agree with John that the term may not appeal to my teachers. I think I will begin to refer to it as the read-write web, too.
I will soon be working with a few students to create a VoiceThread for a World History project. I am hoping to use it as an example in the fall to encourage my faculty to try some tools that are new to them.
I like the idea of “library legends” — we’ve been kicking around the idea of establishing a student “geek squad” at our elementary schools to give students more power over our technology and to help teachers (will they accept it? that’s another tale for another day, I think)
Kevin
We are in the process of launching our KICT (Kids ICT) Commitee (waiting for me to finish the posters actually). This will give students a voice, and open up two-way communication between students and our ICT Committee.
We are hoping that this will cause our Teachers to look at what they are doing, and whether it fits with College Policies.
Keep up the great work. Sadly we only found out that Will was speaking on the Monday before. Not enough time to organise etc. Though we have seen Will at the Expanding Learning Horizons conference, and I am an avid reader of his Weblogg-Ed Blog.
Thank you, Bookjewel, for this post about passion! You just set a whole program for an entire new life at school.
In my school, right now, we are just pioneers, but the engagement of students is carrying teachers away with them.
We are starting to blog with small groups, besides working with the whole classrooms in the Moodle platform and setting up some wikies.
I would like to begin a voicethread project and to share your inspiring site to my colleagues as soon as Comment Challenge is over.
Thank you for the wonderful tips you share in Twitter.
Ines
Thanks inpi,
Passion is so important in education! Unfortunately many don’t realise how important until it’s not there! See you on twitter.