Week 7 - Wrapping Up and Wondering About the Past and Future

 I was in third grade, 1997, when I had my first computer class. I can picture those giant gray boxes lining the walls of the classroom as if I saw them yesterday. I shared such an excitement with my classmates as we sat down and wondered about the wild possibilities in front of us – and learned how to use Corel WordPerfect (which astonishingly still exists). So there wasn't much for us 8- and 9-year-olds to do beside Oregon Trail for fun. As we grew up with AOL Instant Messenger, MSN, Friendster, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, the list goes on, we adapted to the changing ways of being online. Homework help was a one-way street online, you typed in a question to a search engine or encyclopedia CD-ROM and hoped for a relevant answer. Now, there are endless resources and people to chat with online for homework help and researching. The challenge now is for educators to get a hang of these web 2.0 tools and teach them to kids who don't have to adapt to anything, because digital and social media is ingrained in their daily lives. 

Kids still seem to be excited to use technology tools, just like my classmates and I were 24-odd years ago. They want to use what they have at home in the classroom, and we have to let students show us what tools they are using and how they are using them. Further, we have to curate online support communities for educators so that they can collaborate on ideas and share knowledge to bring back to schools. There's much promise for implementing social media in the classroom, and while there's a bit of uncertainty, it's exciting to be on the forefront of this new way of learning and "new knowledge," which is the knowledge of how to attain knowledge instead of simply knowing things.