Why would we want it to be easy?
Teachers just don't know how good they have it anymore.
Back in my day, if you wanted to put up a web page, you created it from scratch. Not anybody could do it either, you had to know a secret code known as HTML. You'd code a little bit, see how bad it looks in a browser, and then go back to tweak your code again. After a few hours, you'd have a page that said, "Mr. Dembo's Classroom. Under Construction." And that was a major accomplishment. If you wanted to get fancy, you'd put up a construction sign as well. And that was good enough for a classroom home page. After all, not every classroom had a precense on the web, eh?
Nowadays teachers have it far too easy. In just a few clicks, they can register at edublogs.org, Blogger.com, or 21classes.com and have an entire site created for them. They don't even need to know a lick of code! Where's the hours wasted, the stench of frustration, the wasted efforts trying to get your text to move to the LEFT of an image? Too easy.
But that's not all. Without even knowing a lick of code, they can embed widgets into their site giving them all sorts of extra functionality. Podcasting? As easy as dialing the phone if you use GCast.com. Need to share a presentation? SlideShare will slide your PowerPoint right into your site. Got data? Not only can you work with it in Swivel, your just a copy and paste away from putting into into a web page or your own.
In fact, if you use a tool like Snipperoo, you don't even need to edit your template more than once! Widgets can be added on the fly using their oh so simple interface. Want a new widget? Click and drag, that's all it takes.
So what's left for a teacher to even do anymore?
Oh yeah. Share student work. Communicate with parents. Provide resources for your class. The things a teacher should be focused on. Content, not code.
What's that you say? Blog sites are blocked? Web 2.0 is left outside the firewall? Well, guess you'll just have to do it like we did in the good ol' days. I'll help get you started.
Comments
You are not old enough to remember those days!
Posted by: Mrs. Durff | April 8, 2007 11:51 PM
Steve, nice post, very encouraging! This is where our energies need to be focused, the second wave. Hm, maybe we need a new name besides the second wave?
Posted by: Cheryl Oakes | April 9, 2007 11:23 AM
Steve, you took me back more than 10 years ago when I did the first Cyberfair project with students. I remember boldly telling my colleagues that my extra-curricular class would 'create' these fantastic web pages based on an environmental awareness theme etc etc...until I realised that we didn't really know the first think about HOW to make a web page! So I rushed out and bought...(I can't even remember it's name now!) an off the shelf coding program and introduced it to the students. Well...to my surprise they elected to learn (teach themselves) HTML from scratch and did 90% of the work in pure code! How about that for dedication....and I learned so much from them! In retrospect it was not hard at all ;-)
Posted by: Julie Lindsay | April 9, 2007 2:50 PM
LoL, Mrs. Durff, I'm old school! I may not remember when "computers were the size of houses" but I was surfing along when the first internet waves starting hitting the shore.
Julie: To be 100% truthful, even with all the new tools making things so easy, I still find myself exercising my HTML skills pretty regularly, and they've been incredibly useful. Whether it's tweaking the size of an embedded slideshare, or adding a hyperlink in a comments box that doesn't have WYSIWYG controls, I've gotten more than ample use out of the time I spent learning basic HTML.
Posted by: Steve Dembo | April 9, 2007 3:38 PM
I've actually been wondering lately if we haven't "dumbed down" some of the visual creativity that was happening when people coded. I think my students are a little bored visually by yet another blog... Sure great content is great, but you can have great content on a great looking and creative site.
Posted by: Susan Ettenheim | April 9, 2007 4:02 PM
Excellent stuff as always Steve. I do remember just a few years back making webquests and having to write the html by hand as well. Talk about tedious!
Posted by: Tom Turner | April 10, 2007 12:23 AM
Good stuff. I often get headteachers saying to me stuff like: "I'm worried about whether to get a 10 zigabyte server or 3 new switches", to which I reply: but that's not your job. I say to ICT co-ordinators who tell me they need more time to create web pages (in html): "But that's not your job". When I was starting out, there wasn't any choice, but now there is, so well-said, young man!
Posted by: Terry Freedman | April 11, 2007 4:17 PM
I love the under construction symbol... Isn't everything? Thankfully we have realized how useless that symbol is now!
When I read your post, I read the implication that we should see a majority of classes using these tools? Why don't we see more?
Posted by: SMeech | April 13, 2007 5:55 AM
This is excellent. Now, we just need to get our teachers to realize that the little time invested on their part to learn this will save time in the long run! Hopefully, they will realize the impact on communication this will have. Great post.
Posted by: Chad Lehman | April 16, 2007 8:13 PM