BWP: Chapter 6

Chapter 6 focused on the social web; more specifically Twitter and social bookmarking. As far as Twitter goes, I'm still a little confused about the relevance of it. I understand how it works (more so than I did before) but I feel that there's better tools available for both myself and my future students to connect to others. Maybe Twitter, like a few other tools I've learned about, is just one of those things I'll have to go on and explore myself in order to make better sense of it and realize all of its advantages. Having been using Delicious for a few weeks now, I felt a little more comfortable reading about how it works. Diigo, while I understand the differences, I don't fully understand the benefits of using it over Delicious. I did find it very interesting that you are able to highlight or add a sticky note to works on your Diigo account. That might be a new way to track student thinking on different reading assignments for them. This technology makes me think about the concept of differentiation, and that as future educators, we will be judged on how well we can make accommodations for our students. Technology like this, while isn't something I don't think I might be interested in, might very well be a great way for some students to learn about and connect with others.


As a result of this thinking, I need to start being more open to new ideas, and that even if I don't necessarily agree with or fully understand them, I might have a student who would benefit greatly from tools like the ones we've read about for today. While things like Twitter are still relatively new, I need to take into consideration that these are tools that might one day be the every day norm for my students and therefore they will probably be more advanced and comfortable with them than I am. I need to not only make sure that I am doing the proper amount of exploring for each of these tools, but also allow myself to learn from my students; they will always know more about the current technology than we do. Our students need to be prepared for a whole world run by connections and technology, and we need to get them ready.