I’m currently enrolled in a master’s class from Lehigh University labeled “Supervision and Professional Development.” As part of the class we were asked to contribute a “best learning experience.” Given my enthusiasm for classroom tech, I offered the following submission:

“The best learning experience I’ve had in the last couple of years is one that not only affected me deeply but has grown to influence and, I believe, improve learning for my faculty and students is the integration of 21st century technology in the classroom and in the school generally.

As a teaching principal, I’ve used online resources over the years to great affect in the classroom. And while useful, the resources I was using were often discrete and disjointed–i.e. I would find a rubric I like here, a worksheet I like there, a study guide hither, and a classroom activity yon. The recent evolution in web 2.0 utilities, however, has changed everything.

I began immersing myself in utilities such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, wikis, NewsReaders, etc. about a year and a half or two years ago. Immediately it was apparent to me how these utilities might be useful not only in the classroom but in the school as a whole. While I had had my students dabble in these technologies previously, they quickly became central to our skills-based learning outcomes as I realized that this is the direction in which learning was moving.

In order to make sense of the exponentially increasing information out there, collaboration via these media has become essential so that I can work together to collate and process the information. And not only that–how I can communicate more effectively with students and colleagues is being revolutionized in new tools such as Google Wave. (I’m kevinblissett@googlewave.com, by the way, if you’d like to join my wave. I have plenty of invites if you need them.)

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve gotten most of my faculty and students on the technology train as well–not because I’m forcing my own interests on them, but rather because they quickly come to realize that we can learn and collaborate better via these media. I’m still learning these techologies; something new comes out every week. But I’m genuinely excited about the tools, and I’ve grown more efficient and connected as I’ve used them. I believe my faculty and students have as well.

Julie Lindsay addresses this topic in her e-Learning Journeys blog. An excerpt:

I tried to explain that my class does not end when the students work out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. My students interact with each other, they interact with me, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of ‘social networking’. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, folksonomy, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else I can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning. I do not apologise for this. I do not essentially see anything wrong with this in 21st century learning. In fact this approach has changed my whole teaching style and changed the way I interact with the students. The development of PLEs (personal learning environments) and ubiquitous and mobile computing means I now start my classes with ‘…open your blogs, refer to the class wiki…etc’ rather than ‘..take out your books and copy from the board’.

Read more.

Photo by San Diego Shooter

Basically I’m having them do three types of post: One is a summary assigned to one student every day detailing what we did in class; the next is a daily reflection on most any topic; the third is a specific writing assignment which we collaborate on.

What I’m noticing is that I’m no longer spending time on discrete grammar lessons, and the students seem to be learning grammar faster because the learning is more meaningful. I highly recommend the use of class blogs for any subject.