New Free Book on Web 2.0

Called Coming of Age "The book provides a set of stories, describing the ways in which Web 2.0 technology can be used in schools, particularly as a way of supporting social, collaborative learning, and a more individualised curriculum." from http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/

You can Download the book here

Publish Your Own Book!

Great article in the latest issue of Technology & Learning about online sites that allow you to publish your own book.

I especially found interesting:

...possible applications for education: student portfolios, teacher-made lesson books, family history projects, PTA recipe books, class photo albums, and literary journals, to name a few.

see article here

Some of the sites listed in this article are:
Kodak
Apple iPhoto
Xlibris
Blurb
Lulu

Flat Classrooms

David Warlick has started a new series of posts and a wiki on Flat Classroom Learning Engines. It is incredibly interesting stuff and a way to address some of the ideas and issues brought up in Flat World. I am intrigued by his ideas but always come back to how do we make this change? How do we take our classrooms from the traditional methods and move them towards the future. I believe that we need to setup a trial site of some kind to do this - a classroom or an entire school (yes I KNOW I'm dreaming here). If we don't show that this method can improve performance on high stake testing I do not think it will gain a following until it is too late!

Some of the interesting quotes from these posts:

"It's more important how we learn than what we learn."

"The teacher could rely on gravity to support the flow of curriculum down to the learners. But as much as we might like to pretend, we (teachers) are no longer on top of the hill. The hill is practically gone."