Thing #5

      School 2.0 means to me basically what the original blog post said--school as it changes and evolves going into the future and seeing it incorporating technology.  Long gone are the days of blackboards and chalk and pretty soon long gone will be the days of whiteboards and dry erase markers! With smart boards and document cameras there is very little need for such things anymore.  Flipping through the top web tools for classrooms, I did recognize quite a few that are being use for my own children and at the school where I currently work.  I work in middle school and we use Edmodo and Mobey Max.  My children are in elementary school, and I'm seeing a lot of use of Wikispaces. 
     I think School 2.0 means very good things for the future, but educators need to be aware that there can be too much of a good thing.  Educators teaching the same content in the same school system need to come together and decide on a minimum of two tools to use for their students.  Using a new type of program can be a learning process itself before teachers are able to get to the actual content.  Students should not still be struggling to navigate through a program while the teacher has since moved on to teaching the actual material.  Fortunately, students today are very tech savvy but we need to be careful about bombarding them with the requirement to know too many programs. I love the article where Steve Hargadon mentioned that everything is becoming participative. We're "talking" and "communicating" more than ever before without even having to be in person or speaking on the phone. I liked his example using the book industry. If we buy a book from Amazon it can easily suggest 20+ other books we might be interested in based on this one purchase. We will most likely buy another book which we never thought we would. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, since such a thing can lead you down avenues where you otherwise never would have gone.