Learning 2.0 is basically how students make sense of and learn from the Web 2.0 tools available to them.
Our students want to learn. They want to be challenged. They want to create. They want to use the technology that is available to them. As long as we keep our students from this emerging technology, they will stay bored and unengaged in our classrooms.
If a teacher takes her students on a field trip, chances are the students will be bored with the location before they step off the bus. Instead of keeping them in one huge group and telling them to listen up, lets give them a smart phone (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) and have them write snippets here and there of what they are learning and post that somewhere online. The students are using the technology that they so desperately want to use, and they are engaged!
If the school systems truly want their students to succeed in life after graduation, then we have to let them learn with the technologies that they are already familiar with. We have become a society that is so scared of the things that might hurt us, so we shield our children from these things. Of course we want to protect our children, but we should teach them how to appropriately react and respond to the situations that might hurt them. Thus, instead of completely blocking Google Images and Yahoo! Images because the students may find pornography when searching for a picture of a bunny, let’s teach our students that the bad images they did find are inappropriate and move on!
According to ACPL, “The thing about Web 2.0 isn't the technology. It's the way people use it.” How do we expect our children to learn, if we don’t let them use it?
References
Allen County Public Library. (2007). Learning 2.0 Introduction. Retrieved from http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/acplib2/
Learning 2.0. (2008, March 31). Video posted to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r4_bnCdWnM
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