Aug 23 2008
Reflection on Anne Davis’ “Putting the Pedagogy in the Tools”
I have sent elementary teachers in my courses to this session, but I hadn’t fully reviewed it myself. I had referred teachers to Anne as I had read enough of her blog to know that the important aspect to her was the pedagogy, not the tool. When I work with teachers I ask them to explore some new web 2.0 learning sites and then respond with first “Why?” they would use a tool, followed by the practicalities of how and when that fit with curricular planning. To me, this path fits with Anne’s chosen definition of pedagogy:
The strategies, techniques, and approaches that teachers can use to facilitate learning.
I spent some time today on the pbwiki Anne created and compared her work to work I have done in using wikispaces as a similar tool. While I had tried most of the tools, some have evolved and changed as we now have AnimotoforEducation and Google Page Creator has become Google Sites. How great that the sites and options keep evolving! I didn’t know about Newspaper Clipping Generator, The Talking Cat Generator and the http://www.fodey.com site had some other options to explore.
This session has given me even more material to put on a wiki I have started that has resources for teachers at the elementary school. Some have been pioneers at moving to web 2.0 tools and they love to have places to learn and share with each other. The more we can create set of resources online, the more teachers can teach each other and refer back as they need a refresher on a particular tool.
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