E-Learning Community 2.0

You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to hit your head and say “how in the world did I not think of that?” Vicki A Davis did that today in her Cool Cat Teacher blog. No wonder she is one of the most linked to education blogs around. Vicki talks about the educational potential of Microsoft Surface. As Vicki says

The applications here for education are incredible! How about a word wall that changes depending on the class that is in your room. Think about the manipulatives potentials — use them but NO clean up — just a little Windex and wipe off the fingerprints!

Think about collaborative work as several students sort objects. Very little children sorting letters or words or images of shapes. Older students organizing individual images to create storyboards. OR maybe taking note cards and placing them in order for a presentation or the outline for a paper. Or perhaps interactively drawing lines to show relationships. Or annotating geometric shapes. Sure you can do some of that with a Tablet PC today but working collaboratively is going to be so much easier with these Surface devices.

I’m thinking that the potential in special education is also going to be interesting. Lots of special education students have either physical or processing differences that make traditional devices difficult. This new tool should allow them to visualize and manipulate things in powerful ways.

While the initial costs are high for educational uses that will change over time and then watch out.

I frequently think about virtual learning environments, what they are, why they matter, what impact they may have on teaching, learning… and the administration of schools and universities.  There’s a great deal of debate about their (as if there’s a category of product called “VLE” to which we can all agree) utility given the effort and cost often required to implement and adopt.

I recently had an opportunity to spend the day with some senior education leaders and policy makers from Europe.  One of the common threads they shared was an unyielding belief (one they intuitively knew but also had research to support) that PARENTS (and their aspirational involvement) are critical to the success of all students.  Their position wasn’t so much centered on how VLE’s may augment the formal or informal learning process… but on how we draw parents into the relationship, leverage their innate aspirations for their children and engage them in a productive, proactive and positive community.

I’m encouraged by insight like the following from an Independent article published today:

“Teachers use the gateway to plan lessons, contact parents and each other and mark school work from home. Pupils can upload their homework for marking and benefit from an e-portfolio of all their computer work, while parents can access their children’s work, check on their attendance and behaviour and even look at pictures of school trips. Unless you invited parents in every week there’s no way they’d have such a window into the life of the school…”