I want my students to be 'hubs'. I agree with Clarence that students need to understand that there is a big world out there and that students need to develop a global perspective. Technology can be the tool to allow that to happen.
I'm excited about having kids read current info about the environment, innovations- good and bad in science, technology.
Some questions- How do you sort through all the info to get the best , most accurate, reader appropriate stuff? This seems like it could potentially take A LOT of time to manage and just read all the info that could come my way. How do I keep up with all of this? I've heard of delicious and twitter. However, what are these 'tools' and what is the potential of these tools? I realize that teaching kids how to access relevant info is the key. The content that we teach today may very well be totally irrelevant in 5 years but the skills to access, sort and evaluate info are the way to go. I know I need to 'be present in the network' to facilitate kids learning with technology and being active, productive participants in the social learning network. However, I have so much to learn to get up to speed and then I worry about keeping up with the speed at which technology is changing.
Great questions Margherite! I think the most important thing to attempt, although difficult at times, is to not become overwhelmed. For me, learning and implementing one tool at a time is the way to go. Blogging with my ELLs was a big learning for me last year, and this year I'm much more comfortable with it. I'm still learning about blogging, as I want to embed videos into them too, but that will be one of this year's goals.
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