It’s not about the technology

“It’s not about the technology. It’s about the community and shared learning.” — Clif Mims.

I was talking to a fellow teacher today about students going into teacher courses at university. She spoke about a student buying exercise books for each of her different subject, not about the student using wikis, blogs or nings. The student did not seem to have any idea about any Web2.0 aspects in her course. I hope she will find that there is a shift to using web2.0 and social media tools in her course. In the past 12 months I have found an amazing world on-line, that offers me so much for my own professional learning, making me a better teacher and I hope that some of my posts/links have assisted others as well. Students, who are intending to become teachers ,need to be looking at educational uses of the tools that many of them are familiar with. They should be able to come into schools with a lot of ideas and expertise that older teachers, like me, can learn from. It should not be the case that they do not see a place for these web2.0 tools in the classroom, or, if they do, only in a limited way. 

So many courses in the US have information available on-line. They offer there students, and others, a wealth of information. For instance, from  Clif Nim’s blog  I found the amazing video below. From this blog I found a lot of ideas for classroom activities, that lead me to think about other adaptations of the ideas, links to other educational media and the comments that others had added to the posts offered other perspectives.  

Clif Mims is an Assistant Professor at The University of Memphis and an Educational Consultant, Educational Technologist, Instructional Designer at Clif Mims Consulting. “I’m interested in the effective integration of technology with teaching and learning.”

 The video below is a presentation about some research about ant life. This video shows what one of the subterranean ant structures looks like. A post on Clif’s blog talked about how it might be used in the classroom. The emphasis is always not on the the “gee whizz” aspect but how to make use of something interesting, in a learning capacity within a classroom, to show students that learning can, and should, be interesting. Watch the video and then have a look at how it might be used.