Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia #edtech

I couldn’t agree more with this post on using Wikipedia in the classroom. Many times I have run across teacher that tell their students to not use Wikipedia as a source because it can be inaccurate. Information on Wikipedia at time can be inaccurate but we should be teaching students to cite properly and to no rely completely on one single source. 

“Wikipedia deserves the same place in most modern assignments that Britannica did in most of ours.”

‘School of One’ Pilot Program Under Way in Chinatown Middle School 131

Now this is a school! Amazing article by the NY Times on a new way to approach educating students. I have always believed that educating students is much more successful when you take this approach and eliminate the confines of the typical four walled classroom. I wish my middle school was like this when I was in school. I probably would have done a lot better.

The thing in the article that stood out most to me was “The model we are using throughout the United States in kindergarten-to-12th-grade education is fundamentally the same as it was 100 years ago,” Mr. Klein said.

“Take a surgeon from 100 years ago and place them in an operating room and they would be totally lost. Take a teacher from 100 years ago and place them in the classroom and they wouldn’t skip a beat.” This statement will always hold true unless more districts and schools take a huge leap like this and change the way things are done.

Technology in the Classroom Part 1: Web 2.0

Ten years ago the Internet was pretty limited on what it could do and who actually used it. I remember when the Internet started to get plugged into schools. It was 1996 and I was in my senior year of high school and we just passed a bond placing Internet access in each classroom for students to use. Each student was also given his or her own email address. This was back in the day when Eudora was real popular and webmail was not around much yet. Few people had email address and if you did you were lucky. Now days everyone has some sort of email and access to the Internet, even if it is using it at your public library. This is even true for teachers. They either have it at home or in their classroom. Now while I was barely brought up in the digital age, and educators older than I were even less so, students of today and tomorrow are definitely being raised under a digital umbrella. There are lots of things that the Internet can be used for in the classroom.

Web 2.0 Tools for Educators

I created this list using Google Docs and I update my Google Docs spreadsheet on a regular basis, but I do not update the Scribd PDF version regularly. I have included a link to the Google Docs version down below.  The Google Docs version contains the links to each website.

View this document on Scribd

Google Docs Version