T3 web2.0 What’s next…

I wanted to wait until people had some time to view our new school web sites to post this article, but I am anxious about having people begin to understand that the design of our school sites is intended to help support learning. I am developing our site to model how a school’s online “environment(s)” can promote student learning and support the goals that we are working toward as a school community. I am also hoping to engage our teachers/school leaders – to consider/recognize that there are many ways our web sites can inspire learning… for them and for their students. Of course, using our sites to convey information and communicate with our school community is a basic intent of any school web site, but what I hope will be unique about our site is its ability to encourage and support learning. I will write about this more on the weekend, but here is just one example that might help to understand how the site can promote learning:

On the main page of our school sites I have posted a focus image in the middle of the page. On our elementary site the image is currently of a student getting off the bus for the first day of school. What if you were to build a writing prompt derived from this picture…

Example: We are excited to have students back in school! As you walked into school for the first day, what were you thinking about? Have you considered what you want to achieve this year? Write a list of three things you would like to accomplish this school year. Also, write down one way that you could help make our school a place that people want to walk into.

Maybe you are a math teacher…

Example: How many seats are on the bus you ride to school? If each seat holds 2 people how many people could be getting off the bus? The distance from the curb to the entrance to the school is 75′. How many days would it take, coming and going, for this student to walk a mile?

Maybe you are a history teacher…

Example: Think about the school you walk into each day. Visit the following web site to investigate how public schools in the United States have changed over time. www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool . Make a list of things that haven’t changed much and a list of things that very different. Finally, what is one thing you would change about our school to improve learning for everyone.

I could go on but, I think you get the idea. I hope others will think about the spaces and resources that could come to life through our web sites, seeking to make them a rich addition to our efforts as a school community. The “motto” that you will on many of the pages is “Share in our growth”. I hope that our school community will begin to see that our web sites hold the potential to do so.

Check back on the T3 page on Monday…. I will be putting together an example that shows how students could use a web2.0 tool (VoiceThread) to build a story to go along with pictures (Digital Storytelling) to enhance literacy.

It has been nice to see educators back at work this week. If you get a chance… check out the Writing Prompt builder or Quiz builder in UnitedStreaming over the weekend. If you haven’t yet created your accounts for UnitedStreaming or netTrekker, I encourage you to do so. If you have any problems setting up your accounts… let me know next week or check out the UnitedStreaming and netTrekker Integration Centers that are linked to the main page of the school web sites. They are full of support resources.