Web 2.0

I really enjoyed searching through K12 Online Conference website. This website is a great resource to have because it allows you to quickly and thoroughly search through useful teaching/classroom topics. The online option for a professional development conference is GREAT! It allows teachers/administrators to access these videos whenever it is convenient for them. There is still a place for comments and questions using this kind of conferencing, and I would love to do this whenever it was possible. I chose the online conference, “Nurturing the 21^st Century History Teacher” because this is one of the subjects that I will be teaching next year, and I think that social studies can be a hard subject to teach. Students usually don’t enjoy SS because it involves a lot of reading and rote memorization. I thought that this conference would help me include technology and other hands-on activities that can be done in the classroom.

The main topic of this conference was obviously technology and how a teacher can use it in his/her classroom during social studies. The conference describes how creativity and innovation are becoming more important and necessary than the so-called left-brain skills in today’s world because of technology. I am not sure if I fully agree with this statement, but I can see some truth in it. Another interesting point that was brought up during the conference was that we need to be teaching for the children’s future and not our past, which means that there needs to be less teacher oriented lessons and more hands-on experimental lessons. The lessons need to be “authentic, social, and meaningful” allowing the students to create and become more innovative, which is necessary for the their futures.

There were a few cool examples that the speaker gave in his conference about how to use technology in SS. The first one was to create a current events online journal for students to use as their own classroom newspaper. The students enter the stores on this journal from things they read about in the daily news, and then they can post them for anyone to read. There are student jobs that can be formed from this like editors, graphics, and layout to name a few. I think this is a wonderful way to get students involved and excited about what is going on in their world. The second example that I liked was creating an online journal about different periods in time. In the speakers example they were learning about what it was like to live in the 1930s and be considered a hobo. The students would research this topic, and create historical fiction stories to post on this site. I think there are so many fun ways to put technology to use in the classroom especially during SS.