To host or be hosted???

I was just over at HitchHikr reading some of the recent blog posts about the NCAECT conference. It really was a treat to see David Warlick and Will Richardson in the same room talking about where we need to go with technology and education. I learned a lot about podcasting and I loved the fact there were a lot more collaborative sessions. I love hearing the conversations around what is working and what isn't working in different districts. It is amazing to me how far some districts are along this path. We are getting there. I feel the biggest struggle we face is figuring out how to deal with the protection issues of hosting vs. not hosting the web 2.0 content. It seems from the conversations I heard that this was true elsewhere also.

I am a proponent of opening it up - letting teachers use any and all tools that will help them teach students better. No matter how great your engineers are (and ours are wonderful) you are never going to be able to produce easy to use tools as quickly as companies like Google can, it just isn't possible.


Some would argue that you just can't allow that because we can't control the content that gets put out there. That is true. We won't be able to control it. But we CAN provide teachers with the training they need to use wikis, blogs, and other web 2.0 tools effectively. I believe teachers are professionals. Capable of using these tools - we just need to allow access and provide the training.

Technorati Tags: ncaect2007 ncaect ncaect07