Primary Questions:

• What is Web 2.0 and how is it related to the flat classroom?
• What is the difference between a blog, a wiki, and a discussion board, and which can have the greatest impact on student engagement and learning in my classroom?
• How do I get my school district to allow us to using blogging and youtube (and Myspace?) in our classrooms?
• Given NCLB and AYP, how do we convince administrators and teachers, perhaps even the entire school community, that an investment in social software tools is critical to life-long learning?
• How can we, or what is the best methodology for, evaluating the impact of social software tools on student performance?
• How do you suggest a school begin a web 2.0 revolution?

• How do we, parents, school board members, administration, teachers, & staff educate your children according to the best possible practices? How do we get the most for our tax dollars?
• Why is writing on the web via computer better than writing on paper in a traditional classroom?*

  Is there research to back this up quantitatively? Qualitatively?

• What is the best place to start if you are training a staff to implement Web 2.0?
• What tools are already available?
• What is the impact of books like ttyl and ttfn (two novels which are written in text messaging format) on the teaching of English?
• How do we help teachers understand the importance and speed of changes in our schools?
• How do we explain the potential of cell phones and accessing RSS feeds to teacher webpages/homework pages on those cell phones to those deeply entrenched in industrial age schools?
• Are we modeling these uses ourselves?
• Why are you blogging?? What do you want to share with readers that they cannot find anywhere else?? Why does YOUR voice need to be added.........and don't think it doesn't -- we need more educational bloggers!!
• Is there any data in the form of a Benefits vs Safety analysis that can be used that 1) acknowledges the issues of concern and their potentials 2) highlight best practice that mitigates the concerns while optimizing student engagements and rich learning experiences 3) highlights the benefits of this engaged learning environment for use by lay people and professionals alike? If not should there be? What would something like this look like?

  ---

• THINGS TO REMEMBER
  •  Look for your CONNECTORS; they make things happen at your school and other teachers look to them to see what new and exciting things they are doing!!
  • Basic instructions make an impact BEFORE the bells and whistles in the same application; teachers need to know they "can do it" before they desire to embellish
  • Excite the students; train the fear out of administrators; training can take the fear away; so can modeling the application
  • Tie controversial apps into assessment to make more appealing??
  • Sometimes success comes from one's personal use of the application.....can you use blogging in your personal life?
  •  Gaggle.net and Epals.com  and Invee.com;  (recommended)