From Web 2.0 to School 2.0: Tales from the Field

by William Kist

In this new media age, it seems we are all not only constantly recipients of messages but creators of them as well. Every time we write an email, we’re creating a text. Every time we post a comment on someone’s Facebook wall, we’re forming a new message—no matter if we’re commenting on our relationship status or whether we prefer Dr. Pepper over Mr. Pibb. There are educators, of course, who do not think this kind of “wall writing” counts as legitimate reading and writing. Or at the very least, it’s just chatter to them, riddled with nonstandard English and emoticons.

While there is much hand-wringing and sighing about the end of book culture, there are other educators who are realizing that there has never been a time when our students have been reading and writing as much as they are during each day. Go to any sporting event or cultural event and you will see people texting and calling, yes, regrettably sometimes during the event itself. But there can be no mistake: They are reading and writing, in some cases almost obsessively.

There have been studies published describing how kids are using social networking outside of schools (Fabos & Lewis, 2005; Jacobs, 2004). But we’re just beginning to get evidence from the field that teachers are also starting to use social networking tools within their classrooms. Certainly, this is what I’ve found after over a year of collecting data for my newly published book, The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age (Kist, 2010).* While many teachers I interviewed expressed fears about Internet safety, many of these same teachers have found ways to keep their students safe as they open up new texts and platforms for their students, giving them some crucially needed practice in navigating the waters of the quite interactive Web 2.0. 

Where do you stand in this debate? Perhaps you’ve heard about Facebook and Twitter and wondered about using them within your classroom. If you listen to the voices of teachers from across the globe who are using social media, you may be inspired to think more deeply about the place of new media and specifically social networking tools in your classroom.

Teachers Are Using Web 2.0 to Connect with the Outside World

Teachers for many years have wanted their students to connect with the “outside world,” whether with experts in a certain subject or with eyewitnesses to an event or process. Many teachers are using interactive media such as blogs or social networking tools such as Twitter to connect with people from across the world. George Mayo, a middle school teacher at Montgomery County Public Schools close to Washington, D.C., says, “I was a truck driver and always wanted to be a teacher, but I wasn’t into technology.”

Mayo attended San Diego State and met influential new literacies educator Bernie Dodge. “He totally turned me around. It totally changed the way that I looked at teaching. This is the first year where I’m teaching the four media classes and the Reading class,” he says. “I’ve gotten six different teachers blogging.” George has collaborated with teachers and students from as far away as Darfur and Vietnam. “I want to have blogging buddies on every continent.”

George sets up student blogs after getting signed parental permission slips. He uses WordPress to host his blogs and, after three years of blogging with his students, has never had any breach of security or any student discipline problems. As a precaution, he is a “member” of each of his students’ blogs, so he gets an email whenever something is posted. George reports that there are some very interesting student-created discussions on various topics as students connect with peers and experts from around the world.

Elizabeth Helfant, of St. Louis Country Day School, describes a similar project, the FlatClassroom Project, “a collaborative project between 10 classrooms from 7 different countries. It uses Web 2.0 tools to make communication and interaction between students and teachers from all participating classrooms easier. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman (2007). Students in our AP Statistics participate in this project with students from the different schools and countries introducing themselves to each other. Students are then put into teams with students from other countries, and each team is asked to research a portion of the overall project. They organize their findings on a collaborative wiki.”

Most are now aware of the huge site, Wikipedia, which consists of thousands of entries on different topics, all co-created by its users. Many teachers are now also harnessing the collaborative power of wikis in their classrooms to enliven research projects and writing assignments. Teachers often use either Wikispaces or PBWorks to host their wikis, which can be created in less than a minute. These wikis can be set up to be completely safe from outside predators, only able to be edited by invited members. The beauty of using wikis is that they can serve as collaborative spaces for students working with fellow students great distances away.   

Teachers Are Using Web 2.0 to Get Their Students to Connect with Each Other

Some teachers are using social networking tools to get kids to connect with one another right in their own classrooms. Any educator knows that there are barriers, many culturally based, that exist between their own students. Elizabeth Helfant thinks that Nings have more potential now than do blogs to get kids connecting with each other. Elizabeth worries that, in most classes, “They’re not really blogging. They’re just putting essays online. Nings help kids get used to discussing, and putting their ideas out there and try to cultivate your audience.” 

Ning is a site that is only four years old and has been transformative in allowing people to set up their own small (or large) social networks around areas of common interest. One can set up a Ning in three steps, as explained on its website, and then colleagues may be invited to join—and the discussion is off and running. A Ning may be set up with forums for discussion, so that certain subtopics have room for conversation. In addition, subgroups may be formed, a feature that lends itself to large projects that may have some small-group components. Many teachers are realizing that their classrooms truly become 24/7 when using a Ning as students log in and out throughout the entire day to make a comment in a discussion forum, or post a blog entry, or add a link to a wiki. One disadvantage of using Ning is that participants must be at least 13 years old, but for those students and older, this social networking platform is serving many functions for teachers, one of which is getting kids to connect with each other.   

Teachers Are Using Web 2.0 to Get Their Students to Connect with Texts

A big challenge for teachers has always been helping students connect with the texts being read and viewed in class. Elizabeth Boeser, an English teacher at Jefferson High School in Minneapolis, uses blogs, wikis, and Nings to help her students inhabit these texts. She often uses online role play as a way for students to get into the skin of the characters they’re reading about. One of the assignments she does is to have students write blog entries in the voice of one of the characters in a book. Sometimes she adds to the assignment by having students blog in such a way that it is directed at another character in the book, being enacted by another student in the class. In this way, she creates connections not only from student to text, but also from student to student.

“I had the students do seven pages of course evaluations,” she reports. “They had to show that they knew how to access information. I am getting student feedback.” Her student feedback demonstrated that students not only had connected with the text, but had made extensions to “real life.” As they read Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008), which portrays a (perhaps) futuristic society in which the Internet is used to control young people, her students began making extensions to Internet policy procedures in their own school. What arose from these connections was a year-long dialogue with school administrators and board members about the usefulness of these school policies. 

It’s clear that many more teachers are using “Web 2.0” in their classrooms. As these applications take root and evolve, perhaps we will soon see “School 2.0.”

References

Doctorow, C. (2008). Little brother. New York: Tor.

Fabos, Bettina, & Lewis, Cynthia. (2005). Instant messaging, literacies, and social identities. Reading Research Quarterly, 40:4, 470–501.

Jacobs, G. E. (2004). Complicating contexts: Issues of methodology in researching the language and literacies of instant messaging. Reading Research Quarterly, 39, 394–406.

Kist, W. (2010). The socially networked classroom: Teaching in the new media age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

*Editor’s note: For a review of Bill’s new book, see For Your Bookshelf.

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William Kist, an associate professor at Kent State University, has been researching classroom uses of new media for over a decade. His profiles of teachers who are broadening our conception of literacy were included in his first book, New Literacies in Action, and is expanded in his new book, The Socially Networked Classroom, focusing on the uses of Web 2.0 in the classroom. Bill remains active as a new media artist himself. Nominated for an Emmy for music composition, he is developing his own screenplay, Field Trip. Bill blogs at www.williamkist.com, and he may be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/williamkist.

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