Web 2.0!

Our world is moving into a new technological age in which the “Net Generation,” and “Digital Natives” are born and raised.  (Rosen, Dina; Web 2.0: A New Generation of Learners)The utilization of Web 2.0 is ingrained in their brains from birth, while older individuals must learn how to switch over to the new Web.  The old Web 1.0 was a “read-only environment,” while the new Web 2.0 is a, “read-write ecology.”  Only a few select, highly trained individuals were allowed to create Internet pages for Web 1.0, meaning that the majority of Web users were readers and gatherers of information, not writers.  Now however,  “Web 2.0 allows for information presentation and participation in creating information…without significant technical knowledge.” (Rosen, Dina; Web 2.0: A New Generation of Learners)  Web 2.0 also includes various digital learning tools, social sharing, and collaboration/communication tools. 

As an educator, I believe that Web 2.0 is an incredibly useful tool for the exceptional education classroom.  One can find numerous digital learning tools on the internet that could possibly aid individuals with disabilities such as text to speech tools, graphic organizers, media descriptions for the visually impaired, etc.  Web 2.0 also has many fantastic sites to aide teachers such as sites that give lesson plan ideas, sites that help you construct IEPs, sites that provide software that will connect classrooms around the world, etc.  Rosen states, “we see education 2.0 as the use of digital tools to transform teaching and learning by having learners, as well as teachers, participate in knowledge creation and interactively build distributed communities, or networks, of leaning.” 

Although Web 2.0 and Education 2.0 provide many benefits for students and educators alike, there can also be several drawbacks to these systems.  For example, using too much of these technologies in the exceptional education classroom can create a technology overload for students, and they can loose valuable offline skills.  Students who constantly use all of these varying technologies are in danger of forgetting skills such as how to communicate with others in person, how to think on one’s feet, how to compose an essay without spell-check, etc.  Overall however, I believe that technology in moderation can significantly improve exceptional education instruction and students’ abilities. 

The Today Show video, “What is the Internet, Anyway?” was absolutely hysterical.  The idea that someone would not know what the internet was or how it works was completely shocking…until I realized that I was that way once.  My peers and I are in an interesting predicament.  We are not Digital Natives, but we are also not Digital Immigrants, we are the something in between.  Although the internet wasn’t popular when we were born, it quickly became popular while we were still very young, and we learned how to use the new technology as natives do.  People of my age group do need to learn some of the new technologies like Digital immigrants do, but we also know enough about the beginning of the internet to laugh when the reporter assures Katie Curic that no, “apparently” you don’t need a phone line to use the Internet – which in 1994, was dead wrong. (Today Show, What is the Internet Anyway)

The video made me think seriously about what life would be like without the internet, how I would survive, and how I’d have to run a classroom.  One reporter in the video stated that, “Internet is the massive computer network, the one that’s becoming really big now.”  This statement was amusing to me because I thought, “lady you think the internet was big in 1994, wait until you see its impact in 2012, we can’t live without it now.”  But at the time the technology was brand new and exciting to the Digital Immigrants.  It got me thinking about how people like this reporter would feel having to learn all of the intricacies of the internet in order to teach their students, who were born Digital Natives, and have had technology by their side since birth.  It must be incredibly difficult, like learning how to teach all over again.  However, many districts and companies now provide computer classes and training that teaches their employees all of the magic tricks of the internet that will help them connect with the children in the class.  I believe that adaptation and learning are lifelong, and that old dogs do need to learn new tricks sometimes.  If teachers wish to provide the best possible learning environment for their students, they need to combine the offline skills that they grew up with and the online skills that their students have grown up with to create the perfect medley.