Edubloggercon 2007 Classroom 2.0

We had an interesting session with Steve Hargadon moderating (very good at moderating by the way) on “Creating an action plan for developing good repositories of lesson plans and training for the use of technology and Web 2.0 applications in the classroom.” It’s covered well in the notes and I think there were some good ideas broached but it isn’t likely to be easy. I could be pessimistic simply because of the difficulties in getting this done on a much smaller scale in our district. Steve and Vicki are much bigger players than I am so who knows? I’d love to be proven wrong.

Even deciding on tags is likely to be more difficult than it appears. There needs to be a lot of forethought going into what kinds of tags would work across state standards and how different each school district is. You’ll need nice broad tags but if they are too broad they won’t be very useful. You could use middle school as a tag but I don’t think you’ll ever get say 6th grade. Even things like life science may vary a good bit in content. Although at some point I guess you just have to make a choice as nothing is perfect.

You also have to keep things economical enough for the tagger that it is both relatively intuitive and quick. The intuitive part will be tough and especially key. That’s one reason why tags are popular now- you don’t have to think very hard to use them (as opposed to sorting by folder etc.).

I don’t know if we’ll ever get a nailed down set of tags to help all educators out but it is a neat idea. Even if a fairly small group (100 would be a lot if they were active taggers) did some standardization things would change. The nice thing about using tags in del.icio.us would be that they don’t create boxes that exclude they can just add to. In other words, I don’t have to take off my other tags to add the “standard” ones.

I’d be game to give it a shot. Anyone else think this is possible/worthwhile?

One thought on “Edubloggercon 2007 Classroom 2.0

  1. Yes, you raise some good questions and I think education needs its own “Dewey” this century. Who will it be and how will it get there?

    DD

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