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You’ve heard it over and over again: Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, are a great
way to get students engaged and
motivated to practice their writing
skills. If you’re new to the whole Web
2.0 world, though, you may wonder
where to start. Fortunately, an army of
educators has already tried them all to
determine what works when it comes
to using these tools in the classroom
and what doesn’t, and researchers
have begun publishing the results so
the rest of us can learn from their
experiences.
I’m one of those researchers. A colleague, Deborah Polin, and I traveled
around the United States to get a firsthand look at how teachers are developing successful Web 2.0 activities for
their classrooms. With funding from
Intel, we interviewed 39 educators in
22 schools throughout the country
about how they employed these tools
in their classrooms in innovative ways
and what helped improve student
learning. We also spoke with and observed many students in these schools.
(You can read the paper we presented
at ISTE 2010 on the Center for Children and Technology website at http://
cct.edc.org/report.asp?id=271.)
We found that the teachers who
have had the best luck with Web 2.0
are using the tools to create ongoing
conversations among students and
“always on” learning communities. We
also learned that, as with any technology, careful instructional planning is
of paramount importance.
Specifically, we identified three
elements that have clearly shaped
how these teachers used Web
2.0 to create sustained,
meaningful commu-
nication among their
students:
• Instituting daily practice
• Carefully considering the audience
• Teaching and enforcing
appropriate behavior
Daily Practice
Most of the Web 2.0 activities that
became the underpinnings of the successful learning communities we studied were not “special projects” that
the teachers assigned to their students
every once in a while. They made using these tools a daily practice in their
classrooms.
That is not to say that the students
used the tools the same way adults use
them in a social or business context.
Our observations suggest that these
tools function very differently in the
classroom than in the “real world.” For
instance, blogs in the public sphere are
often places for experts or celebrities
to share their opinions or activities.
They privilege the individual’s voice
and aren’t really about having a dialogue with Justin Bieber, for example.
Wikis are typically multi-authored
documents, such as Wikipedia, that
focus on the final product while leaving the authors in anonymity. In contrast, we found educators using both
these tools to support the process of
discussing and sharing ideas among
students.
Although wikis had their place in
these teachers’ classrooms, those we interviewed saw blogs as a generally more
effective conversation tool for inspiring
interest and communication. The types
of blogs they used fell into two categories, individual and classroom.
Individual student blogs. Most teachers reported that it was difficult to create meaningful educational activities
as part of daily practice when students
authored their own blogs. In the absence of any big project or special
activity, students were often unmotivated by the individual blog tasks for
various reasons.
Some students were self-conscious
about making their school work publicly available for everyone to read. For
example, one teacher described a failed
blog activity that asked students to
blog about a time when they had been
bullied or had bullied someone. But
less problematic topics were sensitive
for students as well, depending on the
audience they expected to be reading
their posts (more on audience later).
Students also felt reluctant to blog
if they thought they had nothing
meaningful to say about the topic or
suspected no one would want to read
about it. One French teacher, while
exploring how to use Web 2.0 tools,
asked students to post the French
names of three favorite foods to their
blogs and then comment on their
peers’ selections. This, of course, was
not a sensitive topic, but none of the
students found it very interesting.
They described it as “no worse than
any other homework,” and the teacher
was unhappy with the activity.
The most successful individual blog
tasks we learned about involved using the blog principally as a private
means of communication between
the teacher and each student. One
teacher of children with emotional
and behavioral challenges uses private
blogs as a space for students to reflect
freely on their classroom experience
and learning. She requires students to
post regular reflections on their blogs,
where they can express their feelings
about the class. They can access their
own blogs anytime from anywhere
over the Web, but their peers could
not read or comment on their posts.
These blogs served as the students’