Web 2.0 at Work

I didn’t really have too terribly many occasions to use Web 2.0 technologies during my student teaching, but whenever the opportunity arose, I most definitely took advantage of it, often incorporating excerpts from blogs or streaming videos into my instruction.

I also even encouraged students to consider creating their own digital audio or video content instead of just writing an essay and turning it in. In one very memorable instance, a student created a short video for an assignment and then uploaded it to YouTube, which made it very easy for me to view and to share with other teachers and students (with his permission, of course).

Also, while none of the teachers that I worked with used them, at various department meetings I would hear teachers at the lower grade levels discussing the use of blogs and wikis in their classes. One common use for these two particular Web 2.0 technologies was that students were asked to keep a daily journal or a reading journal in which they wrote about their reactions to the content covered in class that day or the material that they read for homework that night, which they would then post and allow the teacher and/or the other students in the class to comment on.

Another similar yet different use of blogs and wikis in the classroom involved students would being asked to write reviews of the books, short stories, plays and poems that they read for class and to then post them, allowing other students to comment on their reviews and note whether they agreed or disagreed with that student’s assessment.

While this sounded very interesting and appealing to me and to the other teachers, when I talked to my actual students about using blogs and wikis in the classroom, the reaction that I received was overwhelmingly negative. Even though they were “digital natives” and have in many cases grown up reading and even contributing to blogs and wikis, that didn’t make the idea of having to use them for class any more appealing than any other type of assignment.

I guess homework is still homework to them, no matter how technologically trendy the teachers try to make it.