Opening Up Your Options

"I believe knowledge construction comes from experiencing or building something yourself or collectively as a team using tools". I ask you all: do you agree?

Chapter five of the connected educator by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach & Lani Ritter Hall focuses on different tools that can be used to support connected learning in a classroom. As a society we need to strive towards "keeping up with the Joneses". As the world becomes more digital we must respond accordingly or we will be left behind. Learning in schools is molded by the materials we use and this can generally be witnessed in an average classroom. In the late 1700s and 1800s a "text book" called the New England Primer became popular in schools. The themes that were portrayed in this book series were religious in nature and focused on a great deal of repetition and memorization to learn about reading and writing. This reading and writing was very plain and typically focused on religion and religious values. This was a widely used reader therefore many students only got to learn through this point of view.

Moving into the days of Web 2.0 tools and classroom 2.0 technology, these limiting (and frequently religious) barriers have been shattered. Using the internet, students and learners of all ages can connect with people across the globe. Students now have access to a much wider variety of cultural information. Students in America can learn through the eyes of a student in Bangladesh or listen to religious ceremonies that are completely foreign from their own. Students can watch what they want, read what they want, and they most certainly are not constrained to one view of the world.

What kind of tools are suggested in The Connected Educator?

• Social Bookmarking!
• There has always been an option to save a link to a site that you have visited in the past. However, archiving websites has become much more complex and useful! 
• Instead of just saving the sites and hoping that they are still active later, users can now archive their favorite articles and easily search hundreds of saved items and then they even have the ability to share these sites with other users. 
• One example of this is the website that is titled Delicious . This creates a community of website savers that extend across the globe. 
• You can also use applications such as digo to save and annotate information directly from a web page. A digo tool can be added to your regular web browser fro convenience. 
• Blogging!
• Blogging has been mentioned in many of my past posts so please feel free to navigate my blog for further information! 
• This is one of the ways that people can connect based upon shared interests and they ride the waves of internet freedom!
• Sites such as edublog.org help teachers or administrators create an online community for their learners on any level. 
• School wide or only in the classroom - edublog.org makes this easy!
• For people that are just starting out with blogging, Googlereader will help you find and organize your new sources for information.
• Microblogs!
• Just about everyone knows what twitter is these days. Its up to us to make sure that it is correctly utilized for professional or academic development! 
• Staying consistent and remaining dilligent about the information you seek and provide promotes success in the world of microblogging. 
• Wikis 
• Ever have problems working on a group project? Is it too hard to email the same document back and forth while communicating all changes between group members? Use Wikis! 
• This is a shared space where people can update and work on documents with one another in real time. No more confusing emails between a bunch of people!

These are not the only options educators have when they want to stay connected on the internet.. I encourage you to look for more and share as many as possible with me so my classroom can become more connected too!