Thing #5

My reaction to Web 2.0: A Guide for Educators and The Horizons Report was: WOW….Really?  I was amazed at what technology has done for the education classroom and teaching careers.  I look forward to creating my own personal learning environment with Web 2.0 through blogs, pod casts, social bookmarking sites, aggregators, and RSS.  Being able to improve my professional career at my own pace will make it easier for me to be the best educator, mom, wife, and house cleaner… I can be and better balance the roles.  Furthermore, I realized that by creating my works in Livetext to create my Professional Portfolio, I was already using Web 2.0’s Social Operating Systems. Go Me!

Web 2.0 is very promising for schools of the future.  By integrating, in the upcoming years, interactive projectors, mobile broadbands (cell phones), collaboration webs, virtual field trips, data mash-ups, collective intelligence, and more schools will become more convenient places to learn.  Using these different technologies will reduce paper use and in turn lessens pollution, improve tracking systems, and reduces paper trails.  The children already use these things for recreation use and by integrating them into the classrooms; just maybe, fun will be reintegrated back into the classroom along the process.