Most schools are members of the web community by virtue of the fact that they have a website developed as part of a district site. Each school uses a template that they fill in content based upon their individual schools information. What does it take to transform a school into a web 2.0 community of learners?
First, teachers and administrators have to understand the difference between a web 1.0 and 2.0 school. I explained this difference during a recent early release professional development session at the Ferryway School. Read the blog entry, Early Release Launches Ferryway 2.0 Tech Plan. Most teachers learned that Web 2.0 is a two-way street when it comes to the Internet. Second, schools need to build out a web 2.0 infrastructure. It sounds complicated, but really it just involves knowing how to assemble content inside a framework that anticipates that students, teachers, and community stakeholders will participate in the 2.0 version of your school. For instance, the Ferrway School has been profiled in several movies by the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s Edutopia site. Visitors to the Edutopia site can leave comments about the videos, but if they want to learn more they can check out the Ferryway school website. The current Ferryway site is a traditional web 1.0 site since visitors simply browse the content that was posted by a few teachers with the magic keys to update the page. The Grazr box below is an example of using a web 2.0 tool to display those Edutopia comments. You can read the latest comments without leaving this blog post by clicking on the titles. Go ahead, try it!