Teach42

The Ed-Tech Insider corner of eSchool news has gone the way of blogs. The current list of people who are contributing it are people that I greatly respect and whose blogs I read on a regular basis. Will Richardson is participating as is Anne Davis, who I greatly respet and have written about previously. I love the sites’ explanation of why those chose to go the blog route:

We chose the blog format because few communications technologies are expected to have as dramatic an effect on classroom learning as weblogging. In fact, blogs are already taking classrooms by storm. An August 2004 article in The New York Times reported that, as early as the second-grade, many U.S. students are using blogs to discuss homework assignments and communicate with one another, and that this online interaction with peers has done wonders to increase students’ interest in what they are learning.

The Times also reported that blogs make sense for schools because they require far less maintenance than traditional web sites, and allow for instant feedback from teachers, fellow students and even parents, who may monitor the discussions on the internet. Setting up a blog is also a snap. The multitude of available software comes with many templates that enable teachers or IT staff to create full-blown classroom sites in minutes. In addition, blogs come with their own RSS feeds, enabling the audience to keep track of the discussion without having to constantly visit the blog itself.

As Director of Technology, I’ve always been pushing my department to keep in mind that our teachers should not need to turn into “technology geeks” in order to take advantage of it. Technology should be simple. It should make life easier for people, not more complicated. In the past, teachers who wanted to have a homepage had to learn to use Dreamweaver. Sure Dreamweaver was easier to use than doing the entire site in HTML, but it was still an arduous process. Blogs make it easy. They make the web accessible to every teacher, student, administrator and parent. And not just accessible, but interactive. The web is no longer simpply about reading and retrieving. More than ever before, it’s about communicating and interacting.

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