2009 Horizon Report

I'm excited to see the 2009 Horizon Report, it's something I look forward to each year to see how we are measuring up. A key point mentioned as one of the critical challenges...

The K-12 Advisory Board also identified critical challenges facing schools as they seek to integrate new technologies into the established structures of teaching and learning environments. 

...There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy

...Issues of assessment and integration of new literacies across the curriculum, and of teacher training, are complicated by the overarching need for a fuller understanding of what constitutes new literacy skills.

Blog, Wiki, Site, Moodle, or just a pencil....

Many teachers are beginning to see the value of online web tools such as blogs, wikis, sites, moodle, social networks, google docs, etc...as tools to manage their class content and as places for students to collaborate and share their ideas but I am finding that many teachers aren't seeing the subtle distinction between these various applications. They may set up a blog when in fact they need a web site or they set up a wiki when what they really could use is a blog, or maybe what they really need is a robust course management tool like a moodle. How do you know which to use?
In general, here is a quick summary of how I see it:

• blogs - one to many communication with comments
• wikis- many to many communication; shared knowledge, everyone is contributor
• google sites- content management with flexibility and controlled by the teacher (students can have sites as well)
• moodle - course management system (much more complex than a google site and control is through an network admin)
• google apps - set of collaborative tools such as google docs, sites, calendars, we can set it up as educational edition where users are part of a domain, i.e. u32 google educational domain

I'll try to blog about these in more detail later.