Mr. Higgins’ Blog

Vicki Davis, aka Cool Cat Teacher, had her time in the sunshine at the K12 Online Conference with her presentation titled “Wiki Collaboration Across the Curriculum.” I enjoyed the organization at which she exhibited during the actually video presentation as well as in real life at her blog and class wiki. Her information really hit me hard because I am trying, as a first year teacher, to involve students in blogging and wikis. Something that I normally would not even notice or mention in a review was the handouts that she has posted also. They provide more textual information about how to be effective in the Web 2.0 classroom. It amazed me when she said several times that she really is not that experienced, i can surely relate with that statement.

The six Pillars of an effective Web 2.0 Classroom

The six prong test she has listed is very interesting to think about…

1. Internet Safety and Privacy
2. Information Literacy
3. Internet Citizenship
4. Internet Teamwork
5. Intentional Internet Activities
6. An Engaged Teacher

I’m going to highlight a few and give my take…

• Internet Safety and Privacy is going to continually become more well defined as more and more people get involved in the online world and children begin to lead lives ENTIRELY in the internet age.
• Information literacy is a hard topic to fathom for students. They have no idea how the RIGHT information can make a big deal in the online world. This is a reason that something like Wikipedia is getting bad publicity.
• An Engaged Teacher! This is more important that even implementing the Web 2.0 technology in my opinion. If the teacher is not buying into anything that has to do with what you want to accomplish, then the students will naturally pick up on this. If you set the trap with your own engagement, the students will act like vultures finding their own prey while learning something!!!

Keep up the great work Vicki.