Tomorrow I’ll be in Winnetka, Ill. speaking to teachers at New Trier High School on what the Read/Write Web means in terms of classroom teaching. I really love the opportunity to speak about all of this obviously, and tomorrow should be even more fun since Douglas Rushkoff is doing the morning presentation. He’s always been someone whose work I’ve admired, and I’ve actully taught from his books in my Media Literacy class. I always use his “Society of Authorship” quote in my presentations. So it’s another opportunity to learn as well as to teach, and that’s what really fuels my passion for all of this.

I’ve written a lot about why I think teaching is going to have to change in the coming years. And as Alan and David and others say, it’s not so much about the tools it’s about the information we can connect to using the tools. Provided we have access, we’re not the best source of knowledge in our subjects any longer. We’re no longer the only teachers our students can have on any particular subject. We’re not the only audience for our students’ work. We’re no longer limited by the four walls of our classrooms. And we’re moving toward a time when collaboration will be central to our practice. All of this requires that we cede much of the control over learning to our students, that we act more as connectors to relevant information than distributors of it, that we model the effective consumption and creation of content, and that we focus on the basic skills and ideas of our disciplines in the context of a more individualized, inquiry based model that develops passionate, or as Alan calls them “fearless” learners.

Today, David writes eloquently about the barriers to moving to such a teaching model, specifically the high stakes testing requirements that are in place today. And of the fear that teachers express that in a few years, education will just be a matter of “plugging in” and standing aside. That will only happen if we forget that good teaching is much more than delivering curriculum. As David writes:

But teaching children involves adults leading them by the hand into their future, fully aware of the the tools and times that we live in, and availing ourselves of all the opportunities and responsibilities.

In a connected world filled with an overwhelming amount of information and sources, good teaching will be as important as ever to help students make sense of it all and to help them become independent lifelong learners.

(From Kairosnews

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

Oy.

The lastest edition of Edutopia gives an interesting look at how new classrooms are evolving. The highlight the work of John Blake at North Whiteville Academy in North Carolina.

“Kids are bombarded by media,” says Blake. “They’re completely high tech, and they don’t know a different way. When you hand them a book, they’re going to say, ‘Is this all there is?’”

Looking for more structure and access control than the wiki system gave him, Blake switched over to Moodle software this fall to manage class-related conversations, homework assignments, and quizzes. He also encourages students to keep blogs using BlogMeister, a student/teacher system created by the Landmark Project. To tie it all together, Blake’s classes use Bloglines, a Web-based tool that aggregates RSS feeds generated by Moodle and BlogMeister, so all the school-related activity and conversation can be viewed in one place.

“This is a mix-and-match generation,” Blake says. “I’m looking at these things as a way to hook into what they’re doing outside the classroom. When they see that I know how to use the technology, they think, ‘This is going to be cool.’”

Blogs, wikis, Moodle, RSS working in concert to create a mix and match learning space for, as John says, a generation that’s becoming more accustomed to this loosely joined approach. And it fits with Clarence Fisher’s reflections of being able to teach his students from 500 miles away:

When I got back to my hotel yesterday and today from my inservice, I fired up my laptop and was incredibly excited to see a lot of stuff waiting for me. Blog posts from kids writing about what they had been doing in class that day. Comments from kids on my weblog telling me that they missed me. Email from kids asking questions and clarifying assignments.

And wiki pages.

I’ve heard lots of people say that should a teacher from 100 years ago walk into today’s classroom, it wouldn’t take all that long for her to figure out what was happening and dive right in. Textbook, noteboard, homework, paper…really all that much has changed. But here are two classrooms where that wouldn’t be possible.

And Miguel Guhlin adds an interesting comment about the “models” these classrooms are defining, that we should have classrooms

…that are “model” only in the sense they are focused on communication, collaborating and construction of solutions that address real life problems.

These technologies are cheap and easy, but they are amazingly expansive in terms of what we can do with our students in our classrooms. It’s just very cool to see more and more teachers beginning to find their way to them.