Sometimes I come across efforts and innovation and I just have to say, "YES!" they get it!
So, I'm giving another Cool Cat Teacher Award to the librarians that are learning and cooperating over at the Disruptive Innovators Wiki. (Feel free to grab this graphic if you're from that wiki if you want it and link to this article!)
Their statement on their homepage should be shouted out to the rooftops:
"Characterized by creating, collaborating, connecting, and conversations, Web 2.0 has the potential to transform learning in today's classroom and school libraries. Teacher-librarians must build an understanding of the information sources and knowledge management that is demanded and desired by twenty-first century learners. These tools can be used not only by our students, but as educators to enrich and share our professional knowledge." (emphasis mine)
Who are the disruptive innovators?
Here is their self introduction.
"The vicarious star-studded glamour of the Hollywood era provides a backdrop for a professional development opportunity available to Saskatchewan teacher-librarians. Designed to engender a passion for reading and exploit the potential of a range of emerging technologies, Meet The Stars: Books & Web 2.0 explores all facets of the school library program - information literacy and the reading and literature programs. Meet The Stars is poised to become an overnight sensation in Saskatchewan libraries."
This course wins a Cool Cat Teacher Award for the following reasons:
1) It understands the nature of being wiki-centric but still encourages each participant to have a voice. On the left side of the wiki are links to all of the participants blogs -- (some great blogs worth reading!)
Participants' Blogs
2) It doesn't teach technology for the sake of technology but rather, it uses technology to enhance enjoyment and learning of the subject matter.
I love the quote,
"Designed to engender a passion for reading and exploit the potential of a range of emerging technologies,"
Passion for reading AND technology enhanced discussion! It is not about the technology but what the technology DOES to enhance what we're already DOING!
3) Use of multiple senses.
I love the voki's that the instructors have used to embed their voice into their introductory page. Widgets of all kinds are great enhancers to projects.
4) Facilitating connections.
The introduction page just gives me chills. Real people using technology to connect and improve their lives.
This is an excellent model of best practice, in my opinion! Great job!
I would suggest that they could use the table of content tag at the top [[toc]] to make the pages a little easier to navigate and also if they want to facilitate sharing, they could have a standard tag for this course in order to share information through delicious and then have an RSS feed to pull it into the wiki (look at the edubloggerworld example of how this works.)
They are light years ahead of others and it is amazing what they are doing! I hope you'll stop by their wiki and leave a comment on the discussion tab like I did! Wow!
It is so important we call attention to those who are doing things RIGHT!
Hat's off to Disruptive Innovators! You are blazing the trail!
tag: education, teaching, bestpractices, wiki, wikicentric, learning, digitalliteracy, digitalcitizenship, disruptive innovators, wikis, educators
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