Recently, I completed my Master of Arts in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan while simultaneously devoting much of my time to student teaching in a school on the outskirts of Detroit. After a nice start with educational technologies in one of my graduate classes, I have become deeply invested in the direction of Web 2.0 tools and its relationship with the future of education.
Maximizing Web 2.0 to Enrich Adolescent Literacies
As a teacher, I have seen as my main goal enabling students to experience the adventure, and hard-won harvest, of disciplined, creative thought that goes beyond any one discipline. To be sure, transmitting knowledge is also important, but today’s knowledge is sure to be surpassed by tomorrow’s. Thus, the greatest gift one can give to the young is to enable them to deal critically and creatively with the new answers, and the new questions, that the future brings.
Alas, that is a far more difficult task than conveying what is already known, for it requires the student to be an active participant in the process. This means that the classroom experience must, at one and the same time, be both structured and free – a kind of disciplined spontaneity on the part of both teacher and students. That’s something a teacher can’t play by ear. It requires a lesson plan that is far more detailed than a prepared lecture. It’s like writing a play in which only your own lines appear in the script, all the other actors are free to improvise, and your part must have alternative versions that anticipate the possible roles the others may play, so that you can choose the best response to make the plot move toward resolution.
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