In my opinion this is a typical 12 year old just moving with technological developments in this age. Most definitely this would be something that I would welcome in my class as I strongly believe that students should be versatile and be prepared for the global market. I was excited with the fact that she took responsibilty of her learning and was even doing additional research. Something I would love to see all my students do.
However there is concern about the people she is communicating with. Is she really communicating with a professor ? What guarantees that ? finally too much freedom can be very distracting.
She has definitely utilised Web 2.0 as defined in wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
as web applications that facilitates interactive information sharing
as she has has done video conferencing , and just the idea of social networking and being able to have the work check by someone in another country.
This definitely would have students interested. But for my school these social netwoking sites are blocked.
So where do we go from here?
I'm assuming that since this is actually a class that requires peer review; her teacher is monitoring the 'experts' she confers with. I share your concern about the web being wide open but that's where guidance comes into the role of learning. I also wish at times that my kids could use social networking for peer reviews but my sites are also blocked. As educators however, we must never allow technology to replace us, we MUST always have an input. Good post!
ReplyDeleteIt always seem to amaze me that in this day and age of technolgy so many school system still have these restrictions about students and the web. Isn't it quite contridictory when we say we want our students to be prepared for a "global world" and yet we block them from the very things that links millions around the world each minute of every day......think about it!
ReplyDeleteWhere indeed?
ReplyDeleteYou are seeing positives such as student ownership of learning, but also negatives, such as loss of control over who your student might be interacting with, coupled with the very real issue in many schools of blocked access on the web (something we will explore in Module 3).
My question is - if we as teachers wait for someone else to address these issues, will they ever get addressed? Once we recognize the learning possibilities, is there a moral obligation on us to do something about it?